a 


Se Saye a 
Pokey: 
eta A a 


5 a5a, 


Py anges tm 
Pathe beens ween paki nks! z Bas 
SH st ee sen Thy 5 42 ¥ Series Paynes 
Gti. 
Petty 
Fi sire a aay 
Peppa ys pba} 
tin sical yds sen be Ga ph oh oe ph Spl, 
“4 ne 


+ 
ee 
erty Merge 
sates a 


con portent 


a i} 


Arr hetserteres 


peeteese 
eth tre te 


aah 2oR fat ara tsy = : Speer us ; ; j 
paket : ees hes : bas a ste totes Seer ee Eis : : Paeh ruts ige 
: ‘ : 2 cant ei : ; ‘ 3 Eerirest cesar 
E asin teat e ach ar ss ereeereet sets 
ert Bae re ho Ye 2 7s te 


Oat 


33 
hs: 


eee ceest 
VSS SEE 


ect ttns Ail’ et mone aes 


ETE 


yc ster 
; MSHS 
See eS Peace ates 
i. : or = 5 <etarae tes 
ox > + a 5 B : ae fu =>, acti oe 


esarahiers: Sea eames 


SS So Sere 
Spee Paes st 
RES = beptese a 


Letaeh tenets watatens a 


Sighs} mm eee 
re vse 3s 


Say asta 
apis e ehabe ee, 
Rte sere tee 


tty 
ae 
eo SALE Gey : ea eee at ance an setts ogSe te vorsibacsy ee: ; east vatetite wereimead sates 


4 
Sree tet 


oN 
meh Lsy art 


SS: 


peepee paatrats 
Nlepumats atest eet 
a z : cs : “ ahh FPS phat teary 
Sat r - ‘ = = eee 
Pe tee be, Sia. g re ¥ 3 7 s % S It3*: * 
f Mites Se ae ae as. cores carat : ear seey 
pare umn guess rare z z 2 : payee caren . E avg ah es 
Fotieee cette eee 4 ee a ye sere Se te eae ea 
eeeus: «tah nit oat, i ‘ oe y 
Spee Pierce ss 
wales 


pee wah 


os 
pSehiees 

5 Rertterr ha 

stor renth ined E ‘ 3 oe ues 


eee re 
= 


piece isieatoe 
yoakapnh4 Tan. A 


Behe Teh tes 
Rin aoe a Ste 


SUSE A ee ae 
pide be Py 


. 
paeess 


Lote ap es Pg oe 





LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
PRINCETON, N. ~J. 


PRESENTED BY 


Mrs. Donald Sinclair 


BJ 1581 .M2 1924 
Magary, Alvin Edwin, 1879- | 
Character and happiness | 


rn 
4 
ee 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


_ https://archive.org/details/characterhappineOOmaga. 





CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


‘e 


a 


a 


‘ie 

a ; 
aa bie 
i | 





CHARACTER 


AND HAPPINESS _ 


4 
A 
ve 

Ld w 





BY 
ALVIN E. MAGARY 


MINISTER, FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 
CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA 


NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
1924 


CopyrRiIGHT, 1924, BY 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 





Printed in the United States of America 





PREFACE 


These chapters have been drawn from the daily 
labor of a preacher in a down-town church. They 
present no plan for the reformation of our social 
order, no criticism of international politics, nor any 
theological innovation whereby the world may be 
quickly saved. They are addressed to men and 
women who would find happiness and continuing 
usefulness in the pursuit of those ordinary practices 
of good common sense by which most of us must 
find the solutions of our problems. 

This is a very simple little book. Perhaps, amid 
the complicated and bewildering things which are so 
freely offered in these clamorous days, it may not be 


unwelcome. 
ALVIN E. MAGARY. 


THE MANSE, 
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1924. 





CONTENTS 


SHIGE MAKING) ) otto ftnegiiy 4 hergun! hh OTR, aie 
BUREOSEV AH LAME M AURA: Pelnscktie yd MC Deu aE ame yee 
A BIT OF WHOLESOME EGOISM . .) 7. ind) G0 
HELNGUHAPPV) Bini rae Heokb ied aM op ellie ie 
WEN TES OURLINGOME 2.00 0a) valk eateniae Rene ae ene 
PHIeEPR LIE Ob POSSESSION } {o,f Asc) js). ah ey ae ame 
BETWEEN DREAMS AND VISIONS ..... . 58 
ASLOOKAIN SEHE MIRROR): hu )css) dy ey eae ae 
MEDEERENSE) OF: DISORDER) (tile as) /a 5 oe on ee ST 
OCTOGENARIAN ENTERPRISE. . . ... . . 93 
REE SOEVENT: LIFES DY (icp He cic hc lh SUR ASS Hoh anion 
THE VINDICATION OF ILLUSION. .. . . . . . 212 
THE BENEVOLENT CONSPIRACY. . .. . . . gar 
THE CONSECRATION OF DEFEAT. . . .). . . 132 
INTEGRATING THE INDIVIDUAL. . ... . . 145 


Hiite ara Nu WHOVOATED LIER Ga ie. Os MOM Ea eS 
vii 


vill CONTENTS 


PAGE 


NEVERTHELESS 0) eli nn le kee en a) Cac kesh es tae en 
THE. BLESSINGS OF BONDAGE (02 oted. fete eee oe 
THE PLACE OF UNDERSTANDING, «2-4. wos So. 8S 
PREREQUISITES TO [HAPPINESS S30) (Se. cet ae ene ee 


PEACE IN’A*s WORLD OF TURMOIL’ > 0 Sci tein uaoe 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 





SELF-MAKING 


ALL men are self-made. For what we are, we 
are responsible. It may not be our fault if we are 
too rich or too poor, or if we lack the social grace 
which can be attained only in a childhood home; 
but for the manhood or the womanhood that is 
ours, we ourselves are to be credited or charged. 
A man’s character is not that which was in him 
when he was born; it is that which he has added, 
by his own choices, to his original endowment. A 
man may be rich in fortune and powerful in body 
because his ancestors were so before him; but no 
man is honest save by his own choice. It cannot 
be denied that right choosing in matters of char- 
acter is made more probable for some than for 
others and that the building of a fine manhood, 
amid circumstances of squalor and sin, is more 
difficult than it is amid the refinements of a good 
home; but there are few of us who can charge our 
failures in character to any unpropitiousness in 
early circumstance so extreme as to justify us in 
disclaiming responsibility for making ourselves 
what we are. Instinctively, we know that it is 
right and just that we should give account of our- 
selves for the deeds we have done. 

Character is, therefore, an artificial thing. It is 

I 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


“made” not “given.” This is not to say that it ts 
unreal. A beautiful building is real, but it is arti- 
ficial. Nature never built a Gothic cathedral. 
Pictures, poems, machines, cities, civilization it- 
self, are real but artificial. They are made by 
men. And so man makes his own life, just as truly 
as he builds his house, by taking thought and reso- 
lution, by self-denial, purpose and perseverance. 
Our pious forefathers called this process of self- 
making “‘edification,”’ which means, literally, build- 
ing. A man, according to their thought, was an 
edifice. The Apostle Peter gives us the specifica- 
tions for such a building. ‘‘Giving all diligence,” 
he says, “add to your faith virtue, and to your 
virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, 
and to temperance patience, and to patience godli- 
ness, and to godliness brotherly kindness, and to 
brotherly kindness charity.” This is the process 
of edification, the building up of the individual 
life. Jesus likens the good and bad self-builders 
to those who build on the lasting rock or the shift- 
ing sands. Paul talks about being built up on 
Christ and urges his friends to use great care to 
build on no other foundation. 

Among all the creatures with which God has 
peopled the earth, man is the only one that creates 
himself. It is this that definitely sets him apart 
from the rest of creation. He alone is the partner 
of the divine in his own making. The command 
to subdue all things is a command, first of all, to 

2 


SELF-MAKING 


subdue and compel the nature within himself and 
to turn it to his own purposes. Insofar as he 
shapes himself in accordance with the plan he has 
adopted, he is a sovereign spirit, akin to God; 
insofar as he remains static, adding nothing to the 
endowment with which he was born, he is flesh, 
brother to the beast, and fit only to return to the 
dust from which he sprang. 

When we look deep into human life, we con- 
clude that all men are alike. They all come into 
the world possessed of common instincts. When 
circumstances press them back into the area of 
those primitive instinctive endowments, they act 
as much alike as wolves might do. Kipling reminds 
us that ‘Judy O’Grady and the Colonel’s lady are 
sisters under the skin.’’ Nevertheless there is a 
tremendous difference in the two women. The 
fact is that the momentous differences among men 
and women are not in the things that lie under the 
skin but in the things which are on the surface; 
not in the things which are fundamental to their 
common nature but in the things which are the 
outcome of their highly differentiated characters. 
They differ as a cathedral differs from a ware- 
house; both may be of the same natural stone; 
the difference is in the plan according to which 
they have been built. They may differ as a gaudy 
house of ill-fame differs from a humble but lovely 
cottage. The nature of the material is of less 


3 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


import than the purpose of the builder and the 
habits of the tenant. 

Primitively we are all alike, inheritors of a com- 
mon nature. There is not one in a thousand who 
would not fight like a cornered rat under certain 
circumstances; not one who would not steal in cer- 
tain extremities. It is because of this heritage of 
common, underlying instincts that we read so un- 
derstandingly the lives of men like Abraham and 
David, who were so great and so little, so saintly 
and so prone to sin. ‘The difference between the 
thief and the honest man is not a difference in 
nature but a difference in character. ‘The instinct 
to take what we want is a natural instinct. Any 
child will take anything he wants until he is taught 
to do otherwise. The character which bids us 
suffer rather than be dishonest is as unnatural an 
attainment as the ability to walk on our hands; it 
is the result of long practice in what all mankind 
believes to be virtue and is the result of purpose 
and creative power in ourselves. 

In the great enterprise of life we are all given 
the materials sufficient to make manhood. The 
colors, canvass and brushes are at hand and it is 
for us to determine what the picture shall be. If 
it is a thing of beauty that we produce, ours is the 
credit; if it is a meaningless daub or a disgusting 
obscenity we can shift the blame to no other than 
ourselves; nor can anyone else bear the conse- 
quences for us. Whatever view of the atoning 


4 


SELF-MAKING 


grace we may hold, we know that forgiveness of 
our sins cannot take place through any transaction 
entirely outside ourselves. In a definite sense we 
must work out our own salvation, we must give 
our own account of the deeds we have done and 
we must bear the consequence of whatever failure 
we have made. 

In all of our judgments of each other we take 
these facts for granted. We remember, for in- 
stance, a scene between John Bright and Benjamin 
Disraeli. Disraeli said to Bright after the great 
reformer had made a speech in Parliament, 
“Bright, I should give anything to have made 
that speech.” And Bright’s reply was candid 
enough. “Disraeli,” he said, “you could have 
done so had you been an honest man.” The as- 
sumption was, of course, that Disraeli had made 
himself the man he was and that he could have 
made himself otherwise. A wife may have a hus- 
band who has a bad temper and red hair, yet if she 
is a sensible woman, she will blame him for his tem- 
per and never think of blaming him for the color 
of his hair. The one he inherited from his an- 
cestors, the other he made for himself. It is prob- 
ably true that so far as inherited characteristics 
are concerned, history is not long enough to have 
recorded any change in men. The men who built 
the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen would be, if translated 
to our own time and dressed in modern clothing, 
no more unlike ourselves than many an immigrant 


5 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


who passes through Ellis Island any day. The 
change that takes place is not a change in “human 
nature” but a change in men. If you and I are 
not changing ourselves constantly, we are not ful- 
filling the character of our manhood. 

It is a persistent and destructive heresy that our 
characters are fixed by influences outside ourselves. 
The weakling excuses himself by saying that this 
or that unfortunate characteristic is natural to 
him. It is all the more to his discredit, that being 
conscious of some particular natural tendency to 
unlovely conduct, he has not gained a victory over 
his primitive self. It may be that charity toward 
the faults of others is the way of salvation; it is 
certain that charity toward our own faults is the 
way of destruction. In dealing with ourselves, 
ruthlessness is the only way of salvation. “If thy 
hand or thy foot offend thee, cut it off.”” To allow 
ourselves the slightest moral discount because of 
some fancied natural disability, is to cheat our- 
selves of the accrument of power which, at last, 
will enable us to take our places among men and 
women of integrity. 

In the making of himself, man encounters cer- 
tain obstacles. There are, of course, the obstacles 
of environment. In every man’s surroundings 
there are some things that influence him for evil. 
In the homes of the rich and poor alike, terrible 
mistakes are made in the training of the young 
and it is doubtless true that many men and women 


6 


SELF-MAKING 


carry through life the spiritual scars of wounds 
inflicted by well-meaning but unwise parents, far 
more terrible than any wounds of the flesh can be. 
Bad environment is not confined to the slums of 
the city. The environment of the neglected child 
is less harmful than that of the over-indulged. 
For most of us, however, whatever may have been 
the material circumstances of our childhood, there 
is little excuse on the score of environment. Our 
parents did for us as well as they could and guided 
us with the best wisdom they had. If we have 
failed to make men and women of ourselves we 
cannot justly blame our failure on the surround- 
ings that were imposed on us; nor can we charge 
our own folly to any want of skill or wisdom in 
those whose highest desire was that we should 
grow up to lives of honor and usefulness. The 
most contemptible of all self-justifications is that 
which implies an indictment of our parents. 

Far more formidable are the obstacles within 
ourselves. In old English common law, the in- 
dictment always read, “Moved and seduced by 
the instigations of the devil.’ This was the 
quaint old way of accounting for the evil that men 
do. Modern psychology accounts for it in much 
the same way, calling the devil by more modern 
and scientific names, such as the subconscious mind, 
suppressed desires, or various kinds of complexes. 
Whatever we may call these inner impulsions to 


7 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


wrongdoing, we must deal with them and conquer 
them before we can attain to character. 

We shall consider, in another place, the experi- 
ences of the Apostle Paul in dealing with what he 
called ‘‘the body of this death.” Matthew Arnold 
recognized a power, outside ourselves, which 
makes for righteousness—that was his definition 
of God. Paul recognized another power, opposed 
to this, a power inside ourselves which makes for 
evil. 

However little we know about human na- 
ture, we know that it is never simple. Every man 
is at least two men. ‘No man,” said Phillips 
Brooks, ‘‘can absolutely characterize his neighbor 
and no man can characterize himself. Every man 
is good, every man is bad.” A celebrated London 
preacher to whom people came from all the 
world to seek advice and confess their wrong- 
doings, has said that his experience in dealing with 
the moral problems and delinquencies of all sorts 
and conditions of men has convinced him that any 
man is capable of doing anything. 

Whether we accept the Calvinistic doctrine of 
foreordination or not, we must repudiate that far 
more terrible scientific doctrine of physical de- 
terminism, which refers sin and criminality, not to 
the motions of the soul but to the shape of the 
skull. Samuel Butler imagined a topsy-turvy so- 
cial order in which men who had embezzled trust 
funds called in a surgeon to cure them and men 

8 


SELF-MAKING 


who had taken cold were put in jail; but the com- 
mon sense of mankind invariably declares that 
every man is himself responsible for the good or 
the bad that he does. Apart from such an assump- 
tion, law and morals and civilization itself become 
impossible. 

We have said that it is on the surface that men 
are most widely different from one another. 
Sometimes we hear persons criticized on the score 
that their goodness is all on the surface. Now it is 
to be much doubted whether there is any goodness 
in anyone that is not on the surface. At least it is 
certain that in the highest type of human charac- 
ter goodness shines like a lighted lamp, set where 
all may see it. One might as well talk of some 
mystic wealth lying hidden amidst unknown moun- 
tains as talk of any goodness that is not expressed 
in conduct. A good man is a man whose actions 
are good. The man whose bad temper and selfish 
conduct must be excused on the plea that he has a 
heart of gold is asking, from his much tried family 
and associates, far more forbearance than he is 
willing to extend to them. A frowning face may 
sometimes mask a kindly spirit; but it is usually 
the expression of a disagreeable soul. “If you 
have tears,” cries Antony, “prepare to shed them 
now!” If you have smiles, let us behold them. 
If there is kindness in you, let it be seen in your 
actions and heard in your speech. No man, having 


9 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


a candle, hides it under a bushel. Also, a good 
tree is known by its fruits. 

What we are is what we have made ourselves 
to be. It is for us to engrave on our lives the sym- 
bols of the eternal or to deface them with the 
obscenities of sin. For you, the time may be partly 
spent and there may be writing that you would 
fain erase. You cannot do it; but you can cast 
your page aside and begin anew. In spite of all 
the powers that make for evil, without us and 
within, in spite of the “‘instigations of the devil” 
and the alluring temptations of which the world is 
full, we can, in the words of Paul, “put off the old 
man, with his deeds, and put on the new man which 
is renewed in knowledge after the image of him 
that created him.” The history of men is lustrous 
with the lives of those who have made stepping 
stones of their dead selves to higher things. It is 
a matter of your own choice and resolution. 


ge) 


PURPOSE 


WE are told that when the Prodigal Son came 
to the end of his remorseful lamentations he said, 
“T will arise and go.” One may imagine him, 
rising to his feet after that resolution with every 
vestige of misery swept from his heart. There is 
no cure for the unhappiness of regret or the sor- 
row of bereavement so effectual as a well-defined 
purpose. Misery cannot live with resolution. As 
soon as we “make up our minds,” relief comes. 
A course of action is better for most cases of un- 
happiness than a course of medicine. 

Men talk of ‘divine discontent” and of “am- 
bition’s holy fire,’ but these things are neither 
divine nor holy. Discontent no more incites to 
action than indigestion does to appetite; in both 
cases there is a gnawing hunger that can never be 
satished. Ambition is often a torture, a tempter, 
a whip without a bridle. The divine thing is pur- 
pose. It is the resolute will-to-do which exhibits 
man’s oneness with the creator. We never live a 
better hour than that when, having brooded over 
our blunders and our disappointments, we rise 
from our posture of ineffectual complaint with a 
commitment to action in our hearts. So long as 

II 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


we keep that resolution and labor toward its ful- 
fillment we shall not be unhappy. 

Before we can form a purpose we must know 
what we want. Blessed is the man who really 
knows what he wants and who bravely sets himself 
to get it. You will be surprised, when you con- 
sider the matter, to discover that there are multi- 
tudes of good things in the world that you can 
very well do without. Every time you cross off 
something that you consider not essential to your 
happiness your chance of happiness increases. A 
writer on transcontinental automobile touring says, 
“The best way to prepare your outfit is to make a 
list of what you think you may need and then 
cross off everything that you can do without. By 
the time you get to San Francisco you will have 
thrown away half of the remainder.” I once met 
an aged friend coming out of a book-store. “Every 
time I visit this place,” he said, “I come out thank- 
ing the Lord that there are so many good things 
in the world that I don’t want.” Many of us have 
permitted ourselves to suppose that we want all 
the things our neighbors have. Let us think this 
over. We shall have taken a long step toward 
happiness when we can look at our friend’s sixty 
horse-power limousine and his six servant-power 
house and say truly to ourselves, “Thank the good 
Lord, I don’t want them.”” We may admire our 
friend’s possessions, we need not pretend to des- 
pise them; yet we may be well content that they 

12 


a, 


PUR Os & 


are his and not our own. Indeed, it is one of the 
necessary accomplishments of a happy life that we 
shall find pleasure in admiring many things which 
we have no desire to possess. One may sit, admir- 
ing a picture in a gallery of art, for twenty minutes 
at a time and yet have not the slightest desire to 
possess it. Perhaps culture might be defined as 
the ability to appreciate and admire things we 
cannot possibly possess and talents we can never 
exercise. 

Yet there must be things that we do want. The 
person who wants everything cannot be happy; 
neither can the person who wants nothing. He 
who needs nothing is the poorest of men. To 
obliterate from our minds all desire, far from 
being a step toward saintship, is a step toward the 
lowest type of bestiality. A jelly-fish wants noth- 
ing. If life is to be interesting we must be spurred 
with some desire, some hope, some promise, that 
shall continue to lure us on in adventurous quest. 
Every one of us ought to thank God if He has 
given us a longing for something that is not too 
easily obtained. If we have no desire of this 
kind, or if our desire be a frivolous one, inadequate 
to supply our advancing life with a sustained pur- 
pose, then existence becomes a bore and all the 
labor we have done seems wasted, because it has 
led us into this blind alley where we can but wait 
in hopeless weariness for release. 

We may want a million dollars or a collection 


13 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


of Peruvian postage stamps, or skill at playing 
the bass drum. Whatever it may be, trying to 
get it will bring us happiness, even though we 
never succeed in possessing it. Men who have 
tried and failed are seldom miserable. Such men 
have recuperative powers; they try again, perhaps 
changing their design to accord more practically 
with their demonstrated limitations. From fail- 
ure men often learn what their true desires are. 
When your bass drum practice interferes with the 
domestic peace and the household rises up in re- 
bellion you may learn that you love domestic peace 
better than you love the thrill of creating per- 
cussive rhythm and you may relegate your instru- 
ment to the attic with complete contentment. The 
Prodigal Son thought he wanted high life in a big 
city, as many a man since his time has done. He 
got it and was sorely disappointed. It was through 
the failure of his false dream that he came to a 
true knowledge of his own heart. 

There is a better chance for happiness if we 
want to do something than there is if we merely 
want to have something. A task to which we have 
committed ourselves is always a source of satisfac- 
tion. No idle, uncommitted life can be wholly 
happy. People who find the world a place of 
slavish drudgery are those who labor, not because 
they believe in their work, but because they must 
somehow provide for the necessities of the day or 
gain that which shall enable them to indulge the 


14. 


PURPOSE 


hour’s appetite. They have no purpose by which 
to measure their progress as they pass from year 
to year and from task to task. Such people may 
want a thousand things, they may want every- 
thing. They reach out, as babies do, for every- 
thing that seems to glitter. A woman may be 
unhappy because she wants a forty-dollar hat. No 
sooner does she get it than she is as unhappy as 
before. She is that kind of a woman. Her de- 
sire straightway flies to something else. It is her 
failing that everything that she has seems inferior; 
everything other women have is superior. It ts 
the rule of her life to want what she has not, and 
to be dissatisfied with what she has. Her life is a 
series of trivial cravings and dissatisfactions be- 
cause she has never compelled herself to make a 
choice big enough to engage and satisfy the 
powers of her soul. Many such a woman, faced 
with some great necessity, has risen to the occa- 
sion like a heroine and has found contentment in 
a purpose which stilled the paltry clamorings of 
self. 

The purpose which most surely promotes hap- 
piness is the one on which we actually work. To 
resolve that, when the time is opportune, we shall 
do thus and so, is of little good; but to make a 
resolution and actually do something toward ful- 
filling it, is one of the solid elements of content- 
ment. To be saving money or acquiring skill, no 
matter how slowly, which one day is to count in 


15 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


the sum of our chosen achievement, is to lay up, 
in addition to money and skill, a fund of self re- 
spect and satisfaction. 

To work toward the accomplishment of pur- 
pose requires a, certain power of will which can 
only be built up by successive individual acts, each 
one involving choice and contributing toward the 
end in view. Therefore, the “‘end-in-view” should 
always be secondary to the means at hand. A man 
cursed by the whiskey habit will never cure him- 
self by resolving to stop drinking. The cure will 
begin when he resolves not to take this particular 
drink that is now offered him. ‘There is no will- 
power involved in forming a general intention. 
The Prodigal Son would have felt no better if he 
had placed “some day” at the beginning of his 
resolution. He was saved from his despair be- 
cause he said, “I will arise and go,” and because, 
forthwith, he did arise and he did go. 

We find happiness in a sense of accomplishment 
and a sense of accomplishment comes only when 
we do the “next thing.’’ A business man, sitting 
in a comfortable chair, envisioning the outcome of 
a year of self-denying industry, will pass the time 
pleasantly enough; but real satisfaction will come 
with a day of thoroughgoing, self-denying indus- 
try. When Dr. Johnson said that hell is paved 
with good intentions he must have meant those 
intentions which involve no immediate action. 
Somehow the purpose of our lives must be tied up 

16 


PURPOSE 


with our daily tasks, so that we may feel that the 
thing we are doing is definitely related to the thing 
we purpose to do. The thought of a boy follow- 
ing a plow may not suggest a college class-room, 
but if the boy is saving his money and preparing 
his mind, every step behind the plow may be a 
step toward the object of his desire. If no “next 
thing’ in our life can be made to contribute to 
our purpose, then we should either change the 
circumstances of our life or change our purpose. 
It is folly for a man of forty, with a family to 
support, and with a competent position in busi- 
ness, to continue to dream of spouting Hamlet on 
the stage or of commanding a man-of-war. If he 
permits such vain ambition to occupy his mind, he 
will inevitably fall at least into the great class of 
the frustrated. He will torture himself with re- 
grets for what might have been. If he really has 
a talent that would have made him an acceptable 
Hamlet or a worthy admiral, that talent can be 
utilized in some artistic endeavor or some exercise 
of leadership still within his reach. Let him un- 
derstand that he failed to realize his larger dream 
because he did not definitely set himself to the 
business of realizing it and let him avoid continu- 
ing in his error. 

Nor need we be turned from our purpose by the 
discovery that we have not so great an equipment 
for its accomplishment as we supposed. It is com- 
mon for people to overrate their abilities and to 


17 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


underrate the difficulty of their chosen tasks. We 
need not give up and confess defeat simply be- 
cause we find that we are not as highly endowed 
as we supposed ourselves to be. Benvenuto Cel- 
lini, in his autobiography, tells of a beautiful piece 
of marble that he secured. He dreamed a statue 
and began to turn his dream into actuality; but, 
alas, after he had done some work on it he discov- 
ered a crack in the marble which made the execu- 
tion of his original design impossible. “How 
rotten it was,” he says, “was shown afterwards. . . 
The narcissus was on a wooden stand and [it was 
upset | so that it was broken above the breasts. I 
mended it and, that the joining might not be no- 
ticed, I made the garland of flowers which you 
can see on its bosom.” Many of us, because of 
some folly of the past, some unfortuitousness of 
circumstances or some defect in ourselves, find, 
in midlife, when we have done much work on our 
design, that we can never make it what we planned. 
Yet we need not cast down our tools. ‘My lord,” 
said Benvenuto, “this marble is much cracked; yet 
for all that I shall make something of it.” So 
may we do with life. The very disappointments 
which have tempted us to surrender may be turned 
to garlands wherewith to beautify our achieve- 
ment. 

The world will help us if we know what we 
want just as the loitering crowd makes place for 
the hurrying citizen who knows where he is go- 

18 


PURPOSE 


ing and why he wants to get there. The question 
is not how fast we go, but how straight, or at least 
how persistently, toward a chosen destination. If 
we are tired of the husks of life it may be that 
we need, like the Prodigal Son, to come to our- 
selves and to say, “I will.” 


19 


A BIT OF WHOLESOME EGOISM 


WirtH all due allowance for modesty, there is 
after all nothing more interesting to us, nothing 
more important to us, than ourselves. One cannot 
write a letter to a friend without the constant use 
of the first personal pronoun. If we do not think 
about ourselves, the chances are that we do not 
think at all, for it is only as we visualize ourselves 
against the background of the world that life is 
intelligible. So we need not be surprised, as we 
read the epistles of Paul to find the first personal 
pronoun used with the greatest freedom. In the 
second epistle to the Corinthians there are some 
two hundred and thirty-nine verses. The first 
personal pronoun is to be found in the epistle about 
three hundred times, or more than once to every 
verse. ‘The Apostle’s ringing announcement con- 
cerning his qualifications and competence for his 
ofice proceeds out of the only state of mind in 
which a man can ever do any great work, a thor- 
ough and aggressive confidence in himself as the 
validly chosen agent of the cause for which he 
speaks. 

‘‘Who is sufficient for these things?” ‘I am,” 
answers Paul. “I am an ambassador of God. I 
am a fellow-worker, a co-partner, with Him. I 

20 


A BIT OF WHOLESOME EGOISM 


am not behind the chiefest of the Apostles. Is any 
man bold to come before God? Soam I. Is any 
mana Hebrew? I ama Hebrew of the Hebrews. 
Is any man a Roman? I was born a Roman citi- 
zen. Is any mana minister of Christ? So am I. 
You say I am a boaster? Yea, and as the truth 
of Christ is in me, no man in the region of Achaia 
shall stop me of this boasting.” 

One of the most popular of misconceptions is 
that worth is always doubtful of itself. The really 
able man is supposed to have a very poor notion 
of his own powers. He is expected to regard any- 
thing he possesses as ‘‘a poor thing, but mine own.” 
Sometimes, in trying to assume what they believe 
to be a creditable attitude of modesty in regard 
to their powers and possessions, men act in an ab- 
surdly artificial manner. There is a difference be- 
tween conceit and self-confidence, between vanity 
and an honest appraisement of our powers. Paul, 
like every other man who has impressed his per- 
sonality on history, knew very well that he was a 
better man than any of those who sought to depre- 
ciate him in the eyes of the world and, though his 
nature was deeply humble, he did not hesitate to 
assert with emphasis his qualifications as an Apos- 
tle of the living God. 

I should like to impress this on the minds of 
those who have begun to doubt their own sufhi- 
ciency. When we allow the world to scare us out 
of our self-confidence, we take a long step toward 

21 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


failure. For that which we are called to do, we 
are sufficient, if we will only think so. What others 
have done and are doing we too cando. We have 
the usual equipment with which men do their work, 
a reasonable skill, a fair mental endowment, a 
moderately good opportunity and the will to suc- 
ceed. Very well, then, we will go ahead. In 
spite of any untoward circumstances in which we 
find ourselves, in spite of the side-long looks of 
those who are swifter to criticize than to encour- 
age, we will take up the burden, believing that 
God will give us strength to carry it. It is part 
of a brave man’s faith that he can do what he 
ought to do. 

It is true that great concerns are committed to 
but few. You and IJ are not numbered among the 
glorious company of the Apostles; yet to each one 
of us, however obscure we may be, is committed 
some task, which must be done by us if it is to be 
done at all. The world’s work is not carried on 
by the few who are great, but by the multitude 
who are commonplace. An English writer of a 
generation or two ago wrote an essay which he 
entitled “Screws.” It seems that in his day an 
unsound horse was called a ‘‘screw,’’ and, in his 
essay, he moralizes at length on the fact that the 
work done in the streets of London was done by 
animals on which the horse fancier would look 
with contempt. These spavined, kneesprung nags 
were far from perfect, yet they did the work of 

22 


A BIT OF WHOLESOME EGOISM 


the city and did it well. So it is with men. The 
world’s work is done by the multitude of mediocre 
folk who simply do their devoted best. Paul him- 
self was not without his limitations. He was not 
a man one would have selected as likely to become 
the greatest religious missionary in the history of 
men. His health was far from good, his temper 
was over-passionate, and his enemies taunted him 
about his insignificant appearance; yet for that 
world-redeeming task to which he felt himself 
called, he knew he was sufficient. 

You and I are sent into the world to work out 
our own salvation; by which we understand that 
we must courageously undertake our own particu- 
lar mission. No other can do it for us. We are 
here to fulfill the purpose of our own lives. Our 
tools are within ourselves. It is our own equip- 
ment with which we must work. It must be your 
brain that thinks through your problems, your 
conscience that guides you, your sin that condemns 
you, and your faith that saves you. The great 
transactions of your life are carried on within 
yourself and cannot be carried on within the per- 
sonality of any other. Your purposes, out of 
which have grown your lifelong efforts, were con- 
ceived in your own mind and dedicated in your 
own heart. You are the only person whose past 
you know and you are the only one whose future 
you can secure. It is well, then, that you should 
think about yourself, plan for yourself, preach to 


23 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


yourself, and, on those delightful occasions when 
you can get anyone to listen, talk about yourself. 

The capital “‘I’’ is the text of the second epistle 
to the Corinthians. The Apostle is writing about 
himself, making his claims, vindicating his work, 
establishing his authority, confuting his detract- 
ors and impressing himself by every means in his 
power upon the minds of those people of Corinth 
who are inclined to undervalue him. As he sits 
down to write, he has in mind the whole Christian 
undertaking, with all its tremendous tasks of 
world regeneration, and he realizes that he is to 
play an important part in setting this great enter- 
prise in motion. As he contemplates the things 
which must be done, the sacrifices which must be 
made, he asks himself, ‘“‘Who is sufficient for these 
things,’ and he answers his own question, ‘‘I am.” 
It is the confident, courageous assertion of a man 
who knows himself and who knows what he is 
called to do. It was an appalling task, sufficient 
to turn the courage of anyone, but this man, physi- 
cally frail though he was, approached it with a 
sure faith in his power to accomplish it. 

Some of the tasks that are given to us ordinary 
persons do require extraordinary powers. What 
a task 1s the training of the young and how inade- 
quate is the average parent’s equipment for it! 
Think of the work that must be done by each gen- 
eration in the preparation of the generation that 
is to follow. Who is sufficient for the work of 


24 


A BIT OF WHOLESOME EGOISM 


guiding boys and girls through the tender years 
of babyhood into childhood and adolescence? 
Who is really competent to be a father, a mother, 
a school teacher or a trainer of the child in the 
things of God? ‘These are immortal souls, with 
which you and I have to deal, and we are often 
daunted when we consider the import of the task 
and our want of experience and skill. Yet it ought 
to be done; it must be done; and there is nothing 
for us but to do it. It is a part of our religious 
faith to believe that we shall be able to do it as 
God wants it done. 

There are times when, as we look on our re- 
sponsibilities, we feel pathetically unequal to them. 
We doubt our own fitness for the work which we 
know we ought todo. Weare frightened by some 
emergency that has arisen in our affairs. ‘Thou- 
sands of men and women have become nervous 
wrecks simply through the fear that they were not 
sufficient for the tasks to the accomplishment of 
which they felt themselves impelled. You and I 
are sufficient for that which God has appointed us 
to do. Our authority is the same as the authority 
of the Apostles. “In the sight of God speak we 
in Christ.” Our sufficiency is the same as that of 
the Apostle, “Not that we are sufficient ourselves, 
but our sufficiency is of God.” A stricken world 
calls for help to men and women who believe 
themselves able to accomplish some part of the 
task of bringing peace and good will to the earth. 


25 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


These things must be done. It is appointed of the 
divine purpose that they shall be done and the 
agents of the Divine are none other than you and 
me. Says John Oxenham, 


“Only through me! The clear, high call comes pealing; 
Above the thunders of the battle plain; 
Only through me can Life’s red wounds find healing; 
Only through me shall earth have peace again.” 


The great men of the Bible were, for the most 
part, under-equipped for their tasks, yet they ac- 
complished them. Moses wanted eloquence, yet 
he left behind him imperishable words. David 
was a stripling, yet he slew his giant. Jeremiah 
lacked natural gifts, yet he became the great 
prophet of his day. Matthew was a tax-gatherer 
and a social outcast. John was a fisherman. So 
the list goes. If the spread of Christianity had 
waited for men worthy to be apostles of Christ, 
the story would never have been heard of outside 
a few Jewish neighborhoods and would have been 
long since forgotten. The most unlikely men were 
the very men to whom Jesus committed the launch- 
ing of His church in the world. 

The Christian church today has a task no harder 
than that which faced the Christian church two 
thousand years ago. ‘These early Christians of 
Corinth and elsewhere faced a Pagan world in 
which sin, greed, infidelity, cruelty and luxurious 
dissipation had become the regular program of 

26 


A BIT OF WHOLESOME EGOISM 


life. What hope was there for such a world? 
Who could be sufficient for such a task? “I,” said 
Paul, “I am,” and in that spirit of self-sufficiency 
for the thing that had to be done, those early 
Apostles of Christ went forth and turned the 
world upside down. It is to us ordinary people 
that the task of overcoming the spirit of hate in 
the world is committed. If civilization is sick it 
is for us to cure it. If it cannot endure with the 
nations warring against one another, then upon 
us ordinary folk is laid the task of abolishing war. 
We must not say we cannot do it. The thing is to 
be done and there are no supermen to accom- 
plish it. 

All the necessary daily business of life must be 
done, and well done, and you and I must do it. 
There are greater men and women in the world 
than we are, but they will not do our work for 
us; nor will they answer for us the vexing riddles 
of our lives. We must work out our own salva- 
tion. It is a necessary part of our faith that we 
can do what we ought to do and that God will give 
us such strength and wisdom as may be required. 

Whatever I ought to do, I must do—that is the 
‘categorical imperative’ of speculative ethics. 
Whatever I ought to do I can do—that is the faith 
of one who believes in the inner powers of the 
soul, 


27 


BEING HAPPY 


A MAN came to me for advice. Life was going 
badly with him and he was in despair; yet, as he 
told his troubles, I could not see that there was 
much that was worth discussing. It was all in- 
tangible and vague. At last I asked him, “What 
is it that you really want?” He answered, “I 
want to be happy and I cannot find any way to 
happiness. My father was a minister and I was 
taught that there was happiness in living a relig- 
ious life, in prayer and worship and service, but I 
have not found it.” 

‘“T want to be happy” is a common cry, but only 
a small percentage of men and women desire hap- 
piness enough to get it. They want it as they 
want a million dollars. They would be glad 
enough if someone would bestow it on them, but 
they have not any intention of working hard 
enough or practicing self-denial enough to get it 
for themselves. It is to be doubted if anything 
worth having can be gotten easily. Certainly most 
of us who miss happiness miss it because we will 
not pay the price and take it. 

A young man of my acquaintance once applied 
to a noted violin teacher for lessons. ‘The great 
professor bade him play and sat gravely puffing 

28 


BEING HAPPY 


at his pipe while he listened. At last he held up 
his hand. “That is enough,” he said, “you do 
very well but you have much to learn. I[ will take 
you if you will agree to stay with me two years 
and to practice five hours each day.” It was a 
definite proposal, to be accepted or refused. ‘The 
young man considered it, came to the conclusion 
that he did not want to be a violinist keenly enough 
to justify the expenditure of so much time and 
turned his attention to other things. One might 
well make the old violinist’s proposal to those who 
come to him with the plea that they want to be 
happy. Practice being happy for two years, five 
hours every day. Undertake the business of liv- 
ing as earnestly as the student of any art under- 
takes to attain the skill that it requires. -Why 
should you suppose that life is easier to attain 
than art? You compel your children to spend 
hundreds of hours learning to spell. How many 
hours do they spend learning how to live? If you 
cannot learn to knock a golf-ball around a meadow 
save by hard practice, why should you expect to 
attain the art of life by any easier process? 

No earnest soul seeks happiness as an end. The 
doctrine that pleasure is the chief good has never 
commended itself to any large part of mankind. 
We always suspect the professed Hedonist of 
being only half convinced of the truth of his own 
arguments, and we know that, brought face to 
face with a great moral situation, he is just as 


29 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


likely to be carried away in the surge of some 
great sacrificial motive as any other man. In ele- 
mental situations, the theory that happiness is the 
chief end of existence simply drops out of mind. 
Yet we instinctively feel that a good man ought to 
be a happy man. The friends of Job, who argued 
that all misery must be the outcome of wrong- 
doing, were expressing a conviction which has 
always been felt by men. There must be some 
connection between being good and being happy. 
Jesus evidently expected that his followers should 
lead happy lives. It is true that he spoke much of 
crosses and burdens and that he called on his dis- 
ciples to prepare themselves for tribulation; but, 
even while he waited for the dawning of that day 
which was to witness his own supreme agony, he 
talked to them of joy and promised them that his 
peace should possess their hearts. 

It is safe to assume that something is wrong 
with the life-plan of men and women who live un- 
happily. The joy of living may not be easy to 
attain; but it should not be more difficult than 
many other accomplishments to which quite or- 
dinary people aspire, such as the mastery of a 
foreign tongue, or the ability to play sonatas. 
Like these things, it may be gained only by sys- 
tematic and assiduous trying. ‘The failure of 
many people to make a success of life is due to 
their blindness to the fact that living is an art, to 
be learned like any other art, adding skill to 


30 


BRING H ABP Y 


natural endowment until a masterful competency 
is attained. Most of us make meaningless daubs 
of our lives because we have not taught ourselves 
to live. When Jesus called to the people to come 
unto him and learn, he implied that the rest he 
promised them was something to be acquired as 
we acquire an art. It is no arbitrarily bestowed 
gift; it is something won through persevering ef- 
fort. 

The first thing we must learn is that there is no 
happiness outside ourselves. The musician knows 
very well that there is no music in his piano. The 
piano is a mere mechanical contrivance, like a 
meat chopper. Indeed, it is probably as imper- 
fect, mechanically, as any invention of man. For 
direct efficiency and mechanical perfection, the 
meat chopper is far its superior. Yet it is the 
means by which the player expresses the music 
that was in Mozart’s soul through the music that 
is in his own, always plus the skill he has taken the 
pains to acquire. The things about us are our 
tools; they are the imperfect instruments by which 
we learn to give expression to the kingdom of 
heaven which is within us. If you ask what the 
musician is to do, supposing him to be deprived of 
the use of his piano, I answer that his piano is 
only one of a hundred means by which a man can 
be musical, that, moreover, music is but one of the 
arts, and that a soul craving artistic expression 


31 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


will find the means, regardless of the price of 
pianos or anything else. 

At the outset of our search for happiness, we 
must understand that, in the higher quests of the 
soul, means are secondary; the sovereign intention 
of the soul is the all-determining factor. This is 
what Jesus meant when he told his followers to 
seek first the kingdom of God (which is “within 
you’) and to let all other things come as they 
would. If we want happiness we must not expect 
it to be handed to us by another, as one might give 
us the deed to a house; nor must we expect to find 
it in the possession of things; if we want to be 
happy we must practice happiness, just as, if we 
want to sing, we must practice singing. ‘The dif- 
ference is that while there be but few who possess 
the fleshly chords in the throat to make a beautiful 
voice, there is no man so poorly endowed as to 
be unable to live a beautiful life, if only he will 
dedicate himself to the learning of the art. 

I am far from minimizing the trials that many 
people are called upon to bear, the blighting mis- 
fortunes, the rending sorrows that darken all the 
face of life for them. I know very well that some 
souls are tried almost beyond endurance, while to 
others are given all the instruments which would 
seem to make a happy life easy to attain. Some 
have grand pianos thrust upon them while others 
yearn in vain for tin whistles. Yet the fact is that 
these gaudily furnished lives are as often wretched 


32 


BEING HAPPY 


as any others, while some of the most blessed men 
and women we have ever known are those who 
have passed through the deepest affliction. The 
vast majority of discontented, complaining, con- 
tentious folk have, at command, all the means 
necessary for a life of sensible enjoyment. ‘The 
tragedy of it is that so many men and women labor 
all their lives for what they think are the means 
of happiness and then spend the second half of 
their lives in a pitiful descent into unhappy old 
age. They are like a man who spent all he pos- 
sessed to buy a perfect violin and then learned for 
the first time that it would produce sweet sounds 
only in the hands of one who had learned to play. 

Many who have learned much else have failed 
to learn this elemental truth. Goethe remarked 
to his friend, Eckermann, that he had lived some 
seventy years and had enjoyed many successes, that 
fortune had been his and a measure of fame such 
as few men enjoy, yet, as he looked back, he 
doubted if he had known as much as half a dozen 
days of real happiness. In the fifty-seventh chap- 
ter of his great work, Gibbon quotes a memoran- 
dum of the Caliph Abdalrahmin to exactly the 
same effect. “I have now reigned above fifty 
years in victory or peace, beloved by my subjects, 
dreaded by my enemies and respected by my allies. 
Riches, honor, power and pleasure waited on my 
will, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have 
been wanting to my felicity. In this situation I 


55 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


have diligently numbered the days of pure and 
genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot. 
They amount to fourteen. O man, place not thy 
confidence in this present world.’’ Both these men 
had everything that heart could wish; yet life was 
not sweet. The idea that happiness is to be found 
in possession of such things is one to which the 
human mind persistently clings in spite of ages of 
human experience to the contrary. We shall have 
made great progress when we have put that error 
away from us forever. 

Sometimes, when we are weary and harrassed, 
we make the opposite mistake. We think that if 
only we had no responsibilities, no houses to keep 
up, no furnaces to tend, no families to rear, we 
should be happy. From this mood springs all that 
sentimental gush about the blessings of poverty 
and ignorance, which earns a living for the unin- 
spired poet. From it comes the foolish notion, 
advocated by Rousseau, that the natural state of 
man was savagery and that, therefore, man must 
be happiest when least concerned with customs of 
civilization. ‘There is no evidence that the savage 
is happier than other men. There is certainly no 
evidence that the educated man, banished to some 
far-off island, where life would be reduced to its 
simplest terms, would be any happier than the 
same man placed in the least comfortable circum- 
stances in a civilized environment. If there is no 
happiness in wealth, there is assuredly none in 


34 


BEING HAPPY 


poverty. It is one of the hypocrisies of conven- 
tional moralizing to proclaim that to be born in 
a hovel is a blessing. It is significant that of the 
two preeminently great men in American history, 
one was born to great wealth and the other to 
abject poverty. In neither case did greatness de- 
pend on worldly condition. In both cases the 
kingdom was within. 

Freedom from anxiety is not the secret we are 
seeking, for, as Froude remarked, freedom from 
anxiety may be attained with a hard heart and a 
good digestion. If those bursts of thankful tri- 
umph, so characteristic of the Apostle Paul, are 
to be taken as a criterion, happiness in its deepest, 
most indomitable form, happiness in the sense of 
blessedness, may be attained by those who have 
not property, hard hearts, nor physical health, who 
are beset by great difficulties and who are, at the 
same time, burdened with what seem to be super- 
human responsibilities. 

This deeper kind of happiness differs from the 
transitory lightness of spirits which we all enjoy 
occasionally, as being wealthy differs from having 
a pocketful of money. As there are days of sun- 
shine in every climate, so there are periods of con- 
scious well-being in every life; yet, even while we 
enjoy these jubilant hours we know that they will 
end. To the soul that has learned to live there is 
no such fluctuation. Its joy is no transitory visi- 
tant, dependent on the weather or the balance at 


35 


CHARACTER ‘AND: HAPPINESS 


the bank. Its happiness is like a well of water, 
springing up into abundant life, refreshing, sweet 
and inexhaustible. It was this quality which the 
man of Nazareth called “blessedness.”’ 

Singers who have learned their trade are never, 
or almost never, hoarse. It is one of the common 
tricks of vocalism to “sing over a cold,” and only 
the expert in the audience can detect it. Just so 
the one who has attained the art of the blessed 
life can endure the slings and arrows of outrageous 
fortune and live beautifully in spite of them. To 
such a character, misfortune may make some dif- 
ference; but it can never make the life anything 
but true to pitch. Misfortune may mean pain; 
but it will not mean discord. Grief may dim 
some of the effulgence of our happiness, as indis- 
position occasionally caused Caruso to sing with 
less gorgeous tonal color than was his wont; but 
always there will be the song and always it will 
be beautiful. 

We must be happy without the things we cannot 
have and we must be happy with the things we 
would fain be without. To suppose that any 
equipment of material possessions or any escape 
from the responsibilities of such possessions will 
make us love life better is to make a common but 
egregious mistake. Happiness comes to rich and 
poor on identical terms. The art of life consists 
in living as we ought to live, as we must live, and 
at the same time in being contented with what has 

36 


BEUNG THA P P.Y 


been given us. To evade a single task that should 
be done is to subject ourselves to the invariable 
discontentment of the indolent; to seek escape 
from any pain that we should bear is to cheat our- 
selves of our opportunity to grow strong in ad- 
versity; to refuse to tread the path that is rough 
and narrow is to confess defeat and weakness and 
to lose all chance of happiness, because it involves 
the sacrifice of self-respect. He is most likely to 
be happy who sees things as they are, who makes 
no attempt to deceive himself, who does his work 
as well as he can and who knows that life is worth 
living on the terms on which it offers itself to him. 
When such a seeker after the abundant life heeds 
the call of the Christ to come unto Him and learn, 
he will not fail in his desire to enter into the life 
of abiding peace. 


aa 


WHAT IS YOUR INCOME? 


WHAT is your income? Once each year the 
government asks you that question. You look into 
your accounts, consult your banker, argue with 
your conscience and, at last, make due rendering 
unto Cesar. But what is your real income? What, 
from among the riches of the world, really comes 
into you? Money does not. He who would keep 
his life uncorrupted must guard its inner portals 
from the intrusion of money. Not money, but the 
love of it, is said to be the root of all evil. It 
does us no harm so long as we bid it keep its dis- 
tance; but when it touches our affections, it ruins 
us. 

What, then, do we take unto ourselves? What 
is our real income? On this April morning, spring 
is difidently announcing herself. A robin outside 
my window, perched high in a new-budded tree, 
sings the opening solo, announcing the theme of 
the summer symphony. As I stand here, filled 
with that exalted contentment that comes to us at 
such times, a child comes into the room, takes my 
hand and stands beside me, looking out and lis- 
tening. The robin has somehow reminded me of 
the first notes of the Eroica and his high treble is 
backed by Beethoven’s profound chords, which 


38 


WHAT.TS YOUR INCOME. 


come surging into memory, so clear and differen- 
tiated that one might take pen and paper and write 
them down. Such are the luminous experiences 
of life. This has been only a minute, but it will 
fill the day with satisfaction. 

Such things as these make up our real income. 
It was one of the purposes of Christ that we should 
have life more abundant. Part of the divine good 
news was the revelation, seen clearly as never be- 
fore, that “‘a man’s life consisteth not in the abund- 
ance of the things which he possesseth”’ and that 
he who seeks the highest, need not be anxious for 
what he shall eat and drink or wherewithal he shall 
be clothed. ‘The gospel of the abundant life was 
to be the possession of the poor and was to fil 
their lives with blessings better than worldly 
wealth. In gaining new gifts from God they were 
to be victorious over their poverty and were to be 
rich in the inner man. Paul, writing to his friends 
at Corinth, says, ‘‘Now ye are full; now ye are 
rich,”’ though it is certain chat they were, for the 
most part, poor people, even slaves. He speaks 
of his own work as the task of one who, being 
poor, yet enriches mary. He speaks of the 
“riches of his grace,’ “the riches of his good- 
ness,’ “the riches of wisdom and knowledge,” 
“the unsearchable riches,’ and “the riches of 
glory.” “I know thy poverty,” says the writer of 
Revelation, “‘but thou art rich.” 

These are the riches of the inner self. We are 


39 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


commanded to lay up treasure in heaven and be 
rich toward God. Surely it is in that kingdom of 
heaven which is within ourselves that we store our 
treasure. There have been pious men who thought 
that the command to lay up treasure in heaven had 
reference to some system of accounting, carried 
on by angelic bookkeepers who, with the proper 
celestial equivalents of loose-leaf ledgers, high 
desks and adding machines, kept careful record of 
our doings. When you committed a sin you were 
charged with it; when you said a prayer, it was 
credited to your account; when, at last, you passed 
out of this life, according to this most logical and 
businesslike system, your book was balanced and, 
if you were found to be overdrawn in the matter 
of self-indulgence, you could not get into paradise 
until you had worked out your debt. The men 
who worked out that system of theology would 
doubtless have been efficiency engineers, if they 
had lived in this generation. 

But Jesus had not any such idea. To lay up 
treasure, in his teaching, is to lay it up in your own 
soul. To be rich toward God 1s to be rich within. 
Marcus Aurelius, taking appraisment of himself, 
says, “Flesh, breath and inner life, that is all.” 
But that inner life! We all have flesh and breath 
and one is not greatly unlike another in this re- 
spect; but the differences between man and man in 
respect of the inner life are as the difference be- 
tween darkness and light. “Wherefore,” says 


40 


WithTA EPPS onyiO U Re lN GONE E ys 


Plato, “let a man be in good cheer about his soul, 
who has cast off the pleasures and ornaments of 
the body as alien to himself . . . who has ar- 
rayed his soul in her proper jewels, which are 
courage, justice, temperance, ability and truth. 
Thus adorned she is ready to go on her journey 
when her hour comes.”’ He saw a man’s posses- 
sions as properly having no vital relation to him- 
self; they were alien to him. To see this clearly 
is to see a long way into the secret of a happy 
life. 

The spiritual and moral graces of which Paul 
so often speaks as life’s true riches, are not con- 
tained within the circumference of our material 
possessions, nor do they originate there. ‘They 
are equally distinct from our physical selves. In 
spite of all we hear about the effect of mind on 
body and body on mind, we know that ill-temper 
and ill-health are quite separate things. A strong 
and healthy body is a precious gift; yet even this 
is not essential to a treasure-filled life. The roll 
of the saints is long and illustrious; yet it 1s to be 
doubted if it would furnish material for a single 
first-class football team. Our modern schools of 
psychology have rediscovered a fundamental truth, 
which Jesus and his apostles taught, and which is 
repeated dozens of times in the New Testament, 
namely, that the cure begins at the center, that the 
ills that afflict multitudes are but the manifesta- 
tions of something wrong down at the core of our 


41 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


lives. In consequence, the method of psychology 
today is simply a scientific elaboration of the old 
injunction to seek first the kingdom of God and 
let all other things follow. Modern psychology 
is diluted faith. The cases which come to the door 
of the psychological practitioner are mostly peo- 
ple who have been careful about many things, as 
was Martha of old, and have forgotten the better 
part. They have gained possessions, they have fed 
and indulged their bodies, they have bought and 
sold and taken profits; but they are people like the 
ancient Laodiceans, to whom the seer said, ‘“Thou 
sayest, I am rich and increased with goods, and 
have need of nothing, and knowest not that thou 
art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, 
and naked.” 

Let us recall a few of the things which consti- 
tute our real income. Beauty is one of the delights 
which God made to enrich the inner life of man. 
The Greeks believed that there was immediate re- 
lation between the sense of beauty and the good- 
ness of men. Certain it is that Jesus reveled in it 
and revealed it. If it is true that Rousseau was 
the first man to put green fields into the literature 
of France, it is also true that, centuries before his 
time, there was One who stood among the wild 
flowers on the Galilean hills and talked to men 
of the loveliness of God’s green earth. To see 
these things is to be enriched with that which can 
never rust and which thieves can never break 


42 


WV Ae Liss eyo) i RANG OVE ee 


b) 


through and steal. ‘Blessed sun,” cried Carlyle, 
“it is sent to all living and the whole wealth of 
the bank of England is not equal to one beam of 
it.’ His remark reminds us of that occasion, re- 
lated by Plutarch, when Alexander, full of the 
pride of recent triumphs, came upon Diogenes en- 
joying the glory of the noonday. The great king 
condescended to the philosopher. Was there any- 
thing, he asked, that the mighty Alexander could 
do for Diogenes? ‘Yes,’ was the reply, “Alex- 
ander can step aside from between me and the 
sunshine.” 

We recall a passage from one of the books of 
George William Curtis, in which a shabby book- 
keeper moralizes during a country walk. 

‘Thank God, I own this landscape,” said Tit- 
bottom. 

“You?” I returned. “I thought it was part of 
Bourne’s property.” 

Titbottom smiled. ‘Does Bourne own the sun 
and the sky? Does Bourne own that sailing 
shadow yonder? Does Bourne own the golden 
lustre of the grain or the motion of the wood or 
those ghosts of hills that glide, pallid, across the 
horizon? Bourne owns the dirt and the fences; I 
own the beauty that makes the landscape.” 

Every one of us is heir to the better part of 
those estates for the physical possession of which 
other men have sacrificed the best of life. Such 
riches are all around us. “The world,” says 


ane, 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


Stevenson, “is so full of a number of things, I’m 
sure we should all be as happy as kings.” We 
may admit that kings are not particularly happy 
people during these democratic days, but the truth 
of the couplet remains. Greed can never fence in 
the sunset nor set a claim on the beauty of a starry 
night. However, men may fall from grace and 
deface the works of the Creator, the poppies still 
bloom on the battlefields and birds still sing among 
the ruins. He is most safely rich who sees most 
clearly and most constantly that God made these 
things and that He made them for everyone who 
will learn to recognize them and make them his 
own. 

The inner wealth of the soul is inexhaustible. 
It needs no thrift to lay it up and keep it. It 
creates and recreates itself. ‘Time does not de- 
stroy it. Your library is full of the loveliness that 
has dwelt in the souls of men, that has enriched 
multitudes and yet is undiminished. Poetry, art 
and music are everywhere spread before the mind 
that has the power to discern. ‘The price of the 
highest things in life is never too high for the 
humblest to obtain. When Beethoven wrote a sym- 
phony, he wrote for millions. Each who hears 
goes away enriched, yet the source of the enrich- 
ment is unabated. How many thousands have 
been filled with a new enjoyment of life by that 
“host of golden daffodils, fluttering and dancing 
in the breeze’? which Wordsworth saw during an 


44 


Wahl tel al Sean UC) Re LN COiM Ee 


afternoon walk? The poet saw them and they 
withered away and decayed; yet they still are 
beautiful because they have passed through the 
treasure-house of Wordsworth’s soul into yours. 
These things are income. These are riches that 
endure. 

Sometimes the commonest things enrich life and 
make it fine when they are mingled with the magic 
of this inner kingdom. When I speak of the tails 
of horses and the entrails of sheep, no suggestion 
of beauty seems implied; yet these are the things 
by which a Kreisler, rubbing one substance on an- 
other, as the insects do, produces the tones which 
have been the delight of a generation of the lovers 
of violin music. Man takes the dirt of the ground, 
grinds it, mingles it with oil, smears it on canvass 
with a brush made of the bristles of animals, and 
behold, a Gainsborough portrait or a Corot land- 
scape. Man takes a shapeless lump of stone and 
transfigures it into the glory of the Venus di Milo. 
He takes the common elements on which his feet 
have trodden and pours them into the mold of his 
dreams and the world is stocked with deathless 
loveliness. Surely, he who can make this beauty 
his own has come into possession of inexhaustible 
riches. 

Truth is another possession of the soul. It 
comes down the ages, from a multitude of seeking 
and finding minds, who have left behind them an 
heritage for all their spiritual kindred. How poor 


45 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


the world would be without the host of men and 
women who have given their lives to the quest of 
God’s own word! ‘The truth,” said Jesus, ‘‘shall 
set you free.” There is much boasting about free- 
dom just now. The fashion of the times is to dis- 
claim all restraint, renounce all allegiance and re- 
fuse to follow any master. As one contemplates 
the behaviour of a certain class of people to whom 
freedom means the putting off of self-restraint, he 
is reminded of the man, described by a popular 
humorist, who, being surprised in a nefarious act, 
‘galloped madly off in all directions.”’ ‘There may 
be much romping about by the “vers libre’’ school, 
not only of poets, but of theologians, of political 
economists and of ethical philosophers; but if 
there be not truth behind it all, the liberty is a 
sham. Folly never made any man free. 

Truth comes to us only when we have learned 
to learn. It is not mere fact of which we speak. 
The statement that a certain man is six feet tall 
may be true, but it is not truth in the sense that 
interests us now. Fact is sight. ‘Truth is in- 
sight. It is that completed vision, which may be 
wanting in many details, but in which the whole 
of the broad landscape is revealed. A photo- 
graph is fact; an etching, suggesting, in its half 
revelations, the inner meaning of that which it 
portrays, is truth. And truth enriches us whether 
or not we ever know ourselves to have attained it. 
It was Leibnitz who said that he would not choose 


46 


WHAT IS YOUR INCOME? 


to have all things revealed to him because the joy 
of life was in the quest of the unknown. One radi- 
cal difference between the higher and the lower 
quests is that in the second we are defeated unless 
we find and obtain, while in the first it is the desire 
to find that enriches us. We know very well that 
the man who sought for the pearl of great price 
would have had an interesting and satisfying life, 
even though he never found it. In these higher 
reaches of the soul we are enriched by what we 
seek more than by what we find. We are fed by 
our own hunger when we hunger for the things of 
God. 

Humor is another goodly possession. It is a 
by-product of the search for truth. It belongs to 
those who love their kind. It is kin to kindness. 
The Bible says that a merry heart doeth good like 
a medicine. There is the empty, raucous laughter 
of the fool; there is the bitter sneer of the cynic; 
but humor is the expression of sympathy, of char- 
ity and cheer. The least acute of ears can detect 
the difference between the noisy cackle of the shal- 
low-minded and the music of the wise man’s laugh. 
It was said of Charles Spurgeon, one of the great- 
est preachers of modern times, that he could keep 
a company of tired preachers in a gale of laughter 
at his Monday morning meetings. Henry Ward 
Beecher so bubbled over with fun, even in the pul- 
pit, that he was obliged to exercise restraint lest 
he disorganize his congregations with laughter. 


47 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


One does not know of any gathering of men at 
which there is likely to be so much pure fun than a 
meeting of Christian ministers. Why is this? Is 
it because these men are released, for the time 
being, from the traditional solemnity of their call- 
ing? Is it not rather that they have looked deep 
into the heart of humanity and have found it 
good? If we have not the gift of laughter, there 
is poverty somewhere in our souls. 

I have mentioned only a few of the many sources 
from which we may enrich ourselves. Need I 
remind you that all of these are but little streams 
that we need only to follow to their source to 
come upon the eternal springs of God’s love? The 
quest for beauty will lead us at last to God, if we 
are faithful. The quest for truth will take us, at 
last, to the mount of transfiguration, where we 
shall behold the light of his presence and hear his 
voice. his is final and consummate fortune. 
Once there, we ask for nothing that earthly kings 
can give, save that they move their gaudy trap- 
pings away from between ourselves and the sun- 
shine of his presence. 

Each morning of your life you awake to the en- 
joyment of treasures which have nothing to do 
with the rise and fall of prices. Each morning is 
your opportunity to accept the heritage of which 
Paul so often speaks, the grace, the glory, the un- 
searchable riches, of God. Your house, your 
bonds, the money in your pocket shall not make 


48 


WEL AE Ds ey O0U Rov DN © ONEE 


you rich, for a man’s life consisteth not in the 
abundance of the things which he possesseth. 
“Somewhere, amid the immeasurable grossness 
and the slag, nestles the seed perfection.” Some- 
where the pearl of great price awaits you. You 
shall be rich if you will seek it. For him who 
would have the highest there can be no failure. 
“Seek and ye shall find,” he said. All those 
things to which Jesus directed the thoughts of men 
as he taught them the secrets of life are still about 
us. The birds of the air still sing, the black-winged 
raven and the sparrow still live though they have 
not toiled nor gathered into barns; the lilies still 
fill the meadow, arrayed in a glory unbought by 
the wealth of Solomon; the green and gold of the 
hillsides still turn the prudent toil of the husband- 
man into visions of beauty, against the day when 
the sickle shall be put in; the sower goes forth to 
sow and the shepherd to tend his flocks; the sky 
is just as blue today as it was then, and the moun- 
tain’s shoulder still cuts sharply into the mystery 
of the distant firmament; the sun still blazes in 
his glory and the waters of the lake sparkle in the 
sunlight, rippling and breaking in tiny rushes upon 
the shore—all this is as it was when first He 
opened the eyes of men to the riches of the spirit 
and drew from every long familiar object of their 
world the lessons of the deeper life. But where 
is He? To some of you, perhaps, He has faded 
into dimming memories and His voice is but the 


Ao 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


echo of a day long past and half forgotten. Let 
Him be your income! “Behold,” he says, “I stand 
at the door and knock. If any man open unto me 
I will come in unto him.” 

What is your income? How rich are you? 
Listen to the Apostle. ‘‘For all things are yours, 
Paul, Apollos, Cephas, the world, life, death, the 
present, the future—all belong to you, and you 
belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.” 

How rich are you? 


50 


THE PRIDE OF POSSESSION 


“THE conceit of Proprietie hardens a man 
against many inconveniences and addeth much to 
his pleasure: The mother abides many unquiet 
nights, many painefulle throwes and unpleasant 
savours of her childe upon this thought, It is my 
owne. The indulgent father magnifies in his owne 
sonne, that which hee could scarce like in a 
stranger.’ These are the words of Bishop Hall, 
contemporary of Shakespere and writer of a 
classic volume of “Meditations and Vows.” 

Many of us would be happier if we would cul- 
tivate this “conceit of Proprietie.’ It can be 
overdone, of course; some people bore us with 
their insistent praise of all things that pertain to 
them, their children, their furnaces, the last pair 
of boots they bought, the cooking of their wives 
and the efficiency of their automobiles. Yet, 
though these folk are bores, we must admit that 
they are cheerful ones. If being well satisfied 
with what we have is ever a failing, it is an amiable 
one and easily forgiven. Too many people have 
quite the opposite failing and miss contentment by 
the habit of deprecating their own possessions. 
If you own a dog, it is both wise and charitable to 


Ly 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


magnify his cleverness and forget the fact that his 
ancestry is promiscuous. 
- I have just purchased, for seven dollars, a ten- 
nis racket which is supposed to sell at thirteen. 
The salesman explained the low price by inform- 
ing me that it was a “‘second.’’ Close inspection 
would reveal in it, somewhere, a slight defect 
which prevents it being sold as perfect, though it 
detracts nothing from its effectiveness as a tool. 
We must all put up with “seconds”’ all our lives. 
We must be more than satisfied with them. We 
must learn to be happy while leading a marked- 
down life in the midst of second-rate people. Our 
preacher is second-rate, our school teachers are 
second-rate, our house was planned by an archi- 
tect who was not quite omniscient and was built by 
slightly imperfect mechanics; our food is cooked 
by someone who does her imperfect best and our 
clothes are washed by ladies less than ideal. Our 
love is blind; yet even wife, husband or children 
seem to us, at times, to be not without their faults. 
Yet we can be proud of our faulty possessions, as 
I am proud of my tennis racket. I challenge my 
opponent to point out its defect and, if I can beat 
him, with his thirteen-dollar racket, the fact that 
I have done well with an imperfect instrument 
adds something to the victory. 

In spite of the handicap of imperfection, wise 
men do their work and are happy. “If the iron 
be blunt,” says the Old Testament, ‘‘then must he 


52 


POEM PRVDE OR POSSESS LON 


put forth more strength.” There are few of us 
who are ‘“‘completely furnished to all good work,”’ 
yet good work we must do. With most of us reso- 
lution must take the place of equipment and in- 
dustry must be a substitute for genius. Though 
the axe be dull, the tree must come down; we must 
not sit idle, sighing for a grindstone, while the fire 
dies for want of fuel. 

It is with our own resolution and courage that 
we must make up for the want of perfection in 
our possessions. He who insists on all things 
being exactly right is a worry to himself and a 
nuisance to his neighbors. Any man may point 
out sixty things in an hour that are slightly wrong; 
only a fool spends his time doing it. Let a man 
see truly and he will see that to be human is to be 
imperfect; to be wise is to live, amidst imperfec- 
tion, a useful and contented life, and to be relig- 
ious is to do all this and yet keep clear the aspira- 
tion toward perfection. 

To find pleasure in what we have, it is not neces- 
sary to have much. It is one of the commonest 
blunders of the seeker for felicity that he tries to 
fill life beyond its capacity. Christmas is supposed 
to be a happy time for children, and yet it is 
doubtful if there is a time in all the year when 
there are more cross and cranky children in town 
than on Christmas afternoon. The reason is that 
the day has been too full. Giving a child too 
many toys will turn his temper, just as giving him 


53 


THES PRIDE OR POS SEs elon 


too much candy will turn his stomach. So it is 
with us older children who have come into posses- 
sion, not of drums and dolls, but of houses and 
automobiles. We miss happiness by supposing that 
we can attain it by making life a kind of continu- 
ous Christmas-tree. By having too much we ren- 
der ourselves unable to take delight in what we 
have. 

Everyone should own something. The man who 
attaches to himself no possession in which he can 
take pride is not wise. Proprietorship is an ele- 
mental instinct which ought not to be denied. One 
may have too much to be a good citizen, or one 
may have too little. There are few so poor as to 
be unable to own something in which a proper 
pride of possession can be felt, something that is 
the best of its kind. Young couples, beginning 
housekeeping, will do well to avoid buying trash, 
even as they do well to avoid possessions which 
are extravagant. A fifteen hundred dollar piano 
in a cottage is a folly; a two hundred dollar piano 
is equally a folly. ‘The one is too expensive for 
poor people; the other is too cheap for anybody. 
There are times when it is wise to indulge our- 
selves in something good. I am writing these 
words with an expensive fountain pen. I could 
do as well with a two-dollar one; but it happens 
that I take great satisfaction in having a fine pen, 
and satisfaction, at such a price, is well bought. 

The decent pride we have in that which is our 


54 


PE BPR ED Ee Oe TO SSE SiS) LOUN 


own should extend to our daily work. I have 
an acquaintance who sells shoes, Now it is my 
idea that a shoe salesman has as temper-trying 
an occupation as any man. He must listen 
all the long day to the same protestations about 
sizes, the same comments on how long the last 
pair lasted and the same particulars as to those 
painful pedal exuberances which man attains in 
his devotion to civilization. He must go over the 
same old arguments about height of heel and 
width of toe. And all this time he is prostrated 
before his customer like a devotee before his idol. 
But my shoe-rzlling friend dismisses all this. To 
him, the putting of shoes on people’s feet is a fasci- 
nating art. He has studied the anatomy of the 
foot. He knows leather from hide to shoe-box. 
He is a Shoe Man, utterly competent in his busi- 
ness, and he is proud of his vocation, as he has a 
right to be. How much more does this man get 
out of his daily work than the man who tolerates 
his business only because he earns money by it! 
There is not one of us who cannot build up, by 
the cultivation of interest and the attainment of 
skill, the same “‘conceite of proprietie” in regard 
to whatever work we do. 

None may be happy who expect too much. Dis- 
cordant households are frequently those in which 
the members of the family expect each other to be 
more than human. Men who are unhappy in their 
daily occupation are usually so because they expect 


55 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


from it more than an opportunity to earn a decent 
competency by the sweat of their brows, or their 
brains. Hard, faithful work wins us something 
short of what we want—let us take in that truth 
and learn to live with it comfortably. ‘They are 
happy who learn to do the best they can with what 
they have. A lady with a second-rate house, a 
second-rate husband, some less than perfect chil- 
dren, a circle of friends subject to human frailites, 
living in a second-rate town in a second-rate cli- 
mate may yet manage a happy life if she will but 
realize that this second-rateness is a part of hu- 
manity, that there is but one perfect being and 
that is God, and that He is too merciful to demand 
perfection. If she will do without the things that 
she cannot have and make competent use of that 
which she does have, if she will abstain from clut- 
tering her house with useless trash and filling her 
days with futile occupations, she will have time 
and thought for the true art of living and as the 
years ripen her in wisdom she will find happiness. 

They are most likely to be happy who learn to 
keep their lives clear of unprofitable possessions 
and to keep a “conceit of proprietie”’ in those 
things which form their necessary environment. 
We need not be boastful of our lot in life, we need 
not expect that others shall admire our homes and 
wives and children, or even ourselves, as much as 
we do; but we can be contented and teach our- 
selves to overlook the imperfections that cannot 


56 


ey hee tet DD) Bee Reh O S'S Est Onn 


be helped. Ifa man’s wife has a crooked temper, 
he may take thought as to how it may be improved; 
if she has a crooked nose, he’d best learn to appre- 
ciate its novelty. He who is proud of his wife and 
children, who thinks his home the right kind of a 
home and who believes his daily occupation to be 
the foundation of all human well-being is likely to 
have a great deal of kindliness and charity about 
him. He is a better husband and father, a better 
citizen and a better Christian than the grumbling 
critic who holds at a discount everything the good 
God has given him. 

‘‘And,” continues the good Bishop, “if wee 
could think, It is my God that cheereth me with 
his presence . . . my Saviour is at God’s right 
hand, my Angels stand in his presence: It cannot 
be, but that God’s favour would be sweeter, his 
chastisements more easie, his benefits more eftfec- 
firales 


Sl 


BETWEEN DREAMS AND VISIONS 


“Your old men shall dream dreams and your 
young men shall see visions,’ says the Prophet. 
But what of the men of middle age? The youth 
of twenty, looking into the future, is stirred by 
the glowing visions that fill the horizon of the 
years and he exults in the triumphs that lie before 
him. The old man, musing by the fire, dreams 
quietly of the days that are gone and his soul is 
tranquil as the images of past joys fill his memory. 
But what shall be the inspiration of the man of 
forty-five, who has passed the time of glowing 
visions and has not yet come to that of quiet 
dreams? He has no time for anything but the 
rough practicalities of life. He must work, keep 
the bills paid, support his family, forget his weari- 
ness and fulfil his responsibilities. The world 
rings with the eloquence of those who celebrate, 
advise and execrate the younger generation and, 
from Cicero down to the latest of our amiable 
essayists, there has been no want of meditation on 
the beauties of old age; but who ever thinks of 
writing poetic literature about people who are fat 
and forty? Father and mother are simply taken 
for granted. We need not be surprised when the 
Prophet leaves them out of the picture. 


58 


BETWEEN DREAMS AND VISIONS 


The ordinary man of middle age is not a roman- 
tic figure. He is preoccupied with business. He 
is a little disappointed with life. Time has passed, 
opportunity has slipped by, and he is little ad- 
vanced toward the fulfilment of his visions. He 
is just one of the millions of men who are on the 
threshold of the second half of life, doing their 
best to keep things going. He has a home and a 
family. He owns a hundred feet of garden hose, 
an electric washing machine and a fair to middling 
automobile. He manages to pay the premiums 
on his life insurance and to support his family re- 
spectably. But for dreams and visions he has no 
time. 

It is with something of a shock that one realizes 
that he has entered on the second half of life. 
Madam Recamier, a famous beauty in her day, 
says in her memoirs, “From the day when I saw 
that the little Savoyards no longer turned round 
to look at me in the street, I knew that it was all 
over.” Undoubtedly the discovery was followed 
by some less than happy meditation. Yet middle 
age ought to be the time in which contentment 
deepens into blessedness; it should witness the 
ripening of character, the conscious competency in 
the art of living which can never be attained save 
by the lessons of the years. The pity is that it is 
so often the time of spiritual decline, when the 
soul is submerged amidst a petty world of material 
cares. The bright visions of the boy have given 


59 


CHAR ACTER GAN D ELAR EN Eos 


place to the drab realities of commonplace exist- 
ence. Later on, the old man shall look back on 
these unlovely things and distance shall lend en- 
chantment to the view; but today he sees them in 
the hard sunlight, with every imperfection ex- 
posed. 

It is largely on the middle-aged that the re- 
sponsibility rests for managing the affairs of the 
world. They have lived long enough to acquire 
skill and not long enough to lose their powers. 
Here and there we find some precocious youth 
managing great enterprises and, here and there, 
an octogenarian delights us with his courageous 
continuance in the fight; but it is on the men and 
women of the middle years that the greater part 
of our affairs depend. In the Old Testament ac- 
count of the restoration of the temple we read 
that the people raised their voices as they beheld 
the foundations of the new house of the Lord. No 
doubt the young men uttered what was the ancient 
Jewish equivalent to a cheer; but we are told, 
‘Many of the priests and Levites and chief fath- 
ers, who were ancient men, that had seen the first 
house, when the foundation of this house was laid 
before their eyes, wept with a loud voice.” These 
old men were dreaming dreams of the past while 
the young ones saw visions of the future; but it 
was doubtless the middle-aged men who had done 
the work. They stood by, leaning on their tools, 

60 


BETWEEN DREAMS AND VISIONS 


while tears and cheers expressed the feelings of 
their fathers and their sons. 

With their entrance on the forties most men 
come to the time when they have laid the founda- 
tions of their fortunes. It is at this time that they 
fall into the error of believing that the best part 
of life is behind them. There are experiences, 
common to most middle-aged men and women, 
which make this deadening assumption seem true. 
At this time of life a man may conclude that he 
has attained as much skill in his business as he is 
likely to attain. He has begun to weary of some 
of the things that fascinated him in youth. He 
may come to be satisfied with his own limitations 
and accept the fact that the world is not his oyster, 
after all. Intimations of mortality begin to ap- 
pear. His fifteen year old boy proves more than 
a match for him in some athletic exercise. Some- 
times he tries to avoid the inevitable conclusion. 
He begins to dress with studied youthfulness. He 
makes strong resolutions to take more exercise, 
convincing himself that all he needs is a bit of 
conditioning. ‘Then the doctor becomes inquisi- 
tive, takes blood pressure and advises more careful 
diet and some self-denial with tobacco. So symp- 
tom follows symptom, until at last he is compelled 
to confess that it is with him as with all mortals. 
He has neither the care-free, insolent attractive- 
ness of youth nor the serene venerability of obvious 
old age; he is merely middle-aged, growing a bit 

61 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


paunchy and a bit grey and often a good deal dis- 
couraged. 

Yet the man of character, whose quest is for 
high things and whose faith is in the highest, will 
at this time enter into the most productive period 
of his life. His realization that life is short will 
stimulate all the powers of his mind and soul, so 
that he shall bring to ripe fruition the stored-up 
skill and wisdom of the first half of his career. It 
may be true that some few men and women do 
their best work in their youthful years. John 
Morley says, concerning Wordsworth, that the 
‘ode composed on the evening of extraordinary 
splendor and beauty” is the one exception to the 
dictum that all his good work was done in the 
decade 1798 to 1808. Wordsworth lived more 
than thirty years after that period. His own 
critical sense must have told him that the best of 
his work was done. It may thus be the fate of 
some of us to watch the departure of whatever 
gifts we have, while yet in middle life; but it is 
not so with most men. No man would trade the 
plays of Shakespere’s later years for those of his 
youth; nor the sounding epics of Milton, composed 
when youth had gone and blindness was upon him, 
for the imaginings of any gifted boy. If we were 
to gather the greatest works that men have accom- 
plished in any field of endeavor, we should doubt- 
less discover that the fruitful time of life is in the 
years past forty. As one realizes that he has en- 

62 


BETWEEN DREAMS AND VISIONS 


tered this period of life, between youth’s visions 
and the dreams of age, let him feel that this is the 
time of harvest which was promised. No man 
loves to lose his figure or watches without regret 
the departure of his hair; but wise men know that 
at the very time these disquieting events take 
place, the powers of the mind and spirit are at 
their best. In youth the wise man sows, in middle 
life he shall gather, in old age he shall enjoy. Let 
him see that now he is full-grown, skillful, compe- 
tent in the things which make mankind supreme 
among the creatures that people the earth. He 
may be less an athlete than he was; but he is more 
a man. 

If neither visions nor. dreams are to tint the 
landscape of life for the man of middle-age, it 
must be that he shall find his joy in seeing things as 
they are. He, of all men, must look life in the 
face, courageously. The practical, concrete re- 
sponsibilities are his. He must keep the pay-roll 
going and pay the rent. As to the essential mean- 
ings of his own life, he must not be deceived; nor 
must he deceive himself. It was Butler who said, 
‘Things are what they are and the consequences 
of them will be what they will be; why should we 
deceive ourselves?’ Matthew Arnold added, ‘“To 
take in and digest such a sentence as that is an 
education in moral veracity.’”’ With our entrance 
on the second half of life we should have learned 
to take truth without discount or embellishment, 

63 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


and to live with it happily. As a man grows out 
of the period when his medicine must be sugar- 
coated, so he ought to grow out of the mental im- 
maturity in which he wants the facts of life sweet- 
ened before taking. He must deal competently 
and faithfully with the commonplaces of existence, 
occupying himself largely with rent and taxes and 
Willie’s shoes; and yet he must be courageous 
enough to labor for these uninspiring necessities 
during all his waking hours without losing his be- 
lief in the essential loveliness of life. 

We must guard ourselves against that tendency 
to stop growing, or even wanting to grow, which 
is the cause of the failure of so many men’s ca- 
reers. Many promising young men never fulfill 
their promises because they come to the middle of 
life and quit. Tastes become fixed, habits become 
inflexible, prejudice supplants thought and the 
whole life turns to mechanical routine. It is re- 
lated that at the inauguration of a President, a 
certain Bishop was observed sitting on the plat- 
form with an expression of deep profundity on his 
face. ‘The Bishop seems to be thinking,” re- 
marked a by-stander to his companion. ‘The 
Bishop is not thinking,’ was the reply. “The 
Bishop never thinks; the Bishop is simply rear- 
ranging his prejudices.” There must never come 
a time in our lives when we cease to add to our 
powers of understanding. “Still Learning’ was 


64 


BETWEEN DREAMS AND VISIONS 


the motto printed on all the books of a wise and 
productive American teacher. 

The responsibilities of middle-age ought to 
make us more interested in more things than we 
ever were before, for it is the nature of life to 
bring to us ever-widening horizons. At eighteen a 
man was a student. His whole life was expressed 
in his interest in his school and, generally speaking, 
he was as like his fellow students as one canary in 
a cage is like the others. But now, at forty, he may 
be a merchant; he may also be an ornithologist, the 
owner of an automobile, a householder, a director 
in a charitable institution, a deacon in a church, a 
stockholder in a railroad, the father of a family, 
a member of a country club and interested in a 
number of other things, each with its incentives to 
the acquisition of knowledge and each with its 
privileges and obligations. The interests of his life 
have broadened and now touch circle after circle 
of his fellow men. Far from becoming narrow 
in his views and prejudiced in his opinions, a man 
at this time of life ought to be a citizen of the 
world in the best sense, and, to him as to the an- 
cient Roman, nothing that is human should be 
foreign. 

Surely this is the time in life for one to take 
thought. Where are you going? In what direc- 
tion does your life tend? Youth is behind you; 
old age is ahead. What kind of an old age shall 
it be? Just ahead may be some big smashing mis- 


65 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


fortune. How will you meet it? Will your man- 
hood collapse or will you march manlike through 
the storm to shelter and security? Just ahead the 
crucial temptation of your life is waiting. What 
will you do? Just ahead death casts a shadow 
before you and, passing through it, you will step 
out into the unseen. With what courage, what 
expectation, what assurance shall that step be 
taken? These questions must be answered and 
this is the time wherein we ought to answer them. 
Between dreams and visions we are given time to 
deal with life’s realities. 

I suppose that when Jesus called to the weary 
and heavy laden to come unto Him and find rest, 
most of His hearers were middle-aged men and 
women. ‘They were the tired business men, the 
weary slaves and the harassed mothers who were 
so crowded with life’s daily duties that they longed 
for a time of surcease. The remark of the duty- 
worn mother, that when she got to heaven she in- 
tended to do nothing but. rest for the first thou- 
sand years, will be understood by many a woman 
who is in the midst of the mother’s task of caring 
for a family. When a “pulpit committee” asks 
me about some prospective occupant of their pul- 
pit, I expect them to inquire diligently about his 
success in ministering to the young, and they in- 
variably do so. I sometimes wonder if the most 
important of all ministries is not to the middle- 
aged. Surely it is in these mid-years that men and 

66 


BETWEEN DREAMS AND VISIONS 


women need the strength and consolation of the 
faith as desperately as they ever need them. It is 
at this time that the world is with them more per- 
sistently than at any other period of life, and it 
is now that the disproportion between strength 
and duty is often greatest. They have neither the 
anticipations of youth nor the memories of age to 
dwell upon; they are in the incessant hurry and 
anxiety of practical affairs. If they should stop, 
the business of the world would stop, for it is the 
middle-aged man who does most of our buying 
and selling, our lawmaking and our manufactur- 
ing, and it is his wife who bears the responsibility 
of training up the coming generation. 

One needs to be on guard against what he may 
persuade himself to regard as the disillusionments 
of middle-age. Cynicism is always a confession 
of failure. He is asad man whom worldly experi- 
ence has taught the price of everything and the 
value of nothing. When the abandonment of our 
youthful fancies means a descent into a sneering 
skepticism regarding those things which have kept 
alive the faith of men and we curl the lip at every- 
thing which purports to be pure and lovely and of 
good report, we have made poor use of our ex- 
perience. That man is most likely to be happy 
who has learned to look at things as they are, to 
love them for their own sake and to know that 
there is a value in them that transcends the com- 
mon view. He understands that they are less than 


67 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


perfect; he clearly sees the tinsel and the dross 
and yet experience has taught him that a thing 
may be mingled with alloy and may turn out dif- 
ferently from what he has expected and still be 
more precious than he had ever dared to hope. 
That deeper happiness, called blessedness, is an 
attainment of the second half of life, rather than 
the first. The happiness of the very young is the 
happiness of innocence and inexperience. It is a 
carefree, irresponsible effervescence, like that of 
the bird that makes the morning musical in spring- 
time. ‘The more solid kind of happiness comes 
later, after men have learned and toiled and suf- 
fered and come to know the value of things. In 
youth there is a barbaric yawp that may be called 
laughter; but it wants quality; it is not quite con- 
vincing; men really learn to laugh in middle life. 
It is then that hearts are merry and that life, if we 
have used it well, enfolds us in friendliness and 
peace. It is easy to be serious, to pull long faces 
and to shake the head. A hundred men may be 
found able to write solemn sermons or statesman- 
like editorials to one who has the gift of tran- 
scribing a happy humor into print. That is why 
humor is not a gift of youth; like wisdom, it wants 
time to ripen it. Youth is serious and, dismissing 
the real affairs of life as frivolous, it devotes it- 
self with solemnity to trifles. That is why boys 
in high school take football more seriously than 
they do mathematics and why they scoff at things 
68 


BETWEEN DREAMS AND VISIONS 


their fathers know to be the foundations of suc- 
cess. [hat is why immature minds are so at- 
tracted by speculations and contentions concerning 
the unknowable, while they utterly neglect the 
revelation that is shining all around them. The 
power to discriminate, to know the difference be- 
tween gold and dross and to know when dross is 
more beautiful than gold, comes later, and then it 
is that men learn to laugh. 

So blessedness comes with middle life, when we 
have ceased to expect that life shall be all sun- 
shine and to fear that it shall be all cloud, when 
we have learned to live with our unsolved prob- 
lems and be happy in spite of them, when we have 
tried our faith and found it valid and have tried 
our friends and found them true, when we have 
seen all the evil that men can do and all the base 
metal that lies beneath life’s gilding and yet have 
kept our spirit sweet and our trust undaunted. 
When we have learned to mingle in the cup of life 
laughter and tears, toil and rest, disappointment 
and fulfillment, and make a satisfying draught of 
all, then does blessedness begin. 


A LOOK IN THE MIRROR 


‘Gray hairs are here and there upon him and 
he knoweth it not,’’ says the prophet Hosea. Or, 
he might have added, if he knoweth it he treateth 
it with dye or jerketh it out and teacheth himself 
to believe that he is still but a youth. The prophet 
was speaking of a nation which wilfully blinded 
itself to the symptoms of its own decay. The dis- 
position to blind the eyes to signs of decline is 
common to a multitude of otherwise sensible folk. 
We do not want to lose our youth and we fight off 
the encroaching signs of middle age as long as we 
can. Edersheim tells us that the ancient rabbis 
made it a law that no woman should look in the 
mirror on the Sabbath day, explaining that the 
prohibition was imposed because, if she looked in 
the mirror and saw a gray hair, any woman would 
be sure to pull it out, thus offending gravely 
against the sacredness of the day. 

There are few more disquieting moments than 
those which follow the discovery of our first gray 
hairs, or the first occasion when our wives inform 
us that, despite the art of the barber, our bald spot 
is beginning to shine forth like a good deed in a 
naughty world. Perhaps one of them is that dread 
day when, for the first time, a man hears himself 


7O 


Ae LO OR TEN @ Le Ea VEER Riu 


referred to by some thoughtless child as “‘that old 
man.’ By the time we touch the first forties, we 
ourselves have learned never to call any man old 
until he is somewhere within reach of eighty, thus 
encouraging ourselves in the continuing illusion of 
our own youth. Peter Pan was by no means the 
only boy who has refused to grow up. Ask a boy 
of eighteen his definition of a young man and ask 
his father of fifty and you will get significantly 
different answers. 

What will you do on that portentous day when, 
hovering before the mirror with a properly modest 
appreciation of your charms, you discover that 
your hair is whitening, or disappearing, far faster 
than you supposed? You may do as a well-known 
American editor did. A friend met him on the 
street in London one day and was astonished to 
observe that he had shaved off his moustache. 
‘Why in the world did you do that?” he asked. 
“Well, to be honest,’ was the answer, “‘the damn 
thing was getting gray.’”’ ‘That is one way to treat 
the signs of departed youth. We can pull out the 
gray hairs, shave off the tinged moustache or buy 
a bottle of dye and fool our friends, for a time; 
but the course of nature will go on just the same 
and youth will insist on being left behind. Nor 
can we play the part with success for more than 
a few years. Departed youth is never so pitiful 
as in a woman who persists in dressing like her 
grandchildren, or a man of fifty who strives pa- 


yee 


CRARA CEE R VAIN ELA P DN os 


thetically to show the world that he is still a gay 
young dog. 

But despite our dislike for them, there are 
things more serious than gray hairs. The man 
is fortunate who is reminded of the approach of 
middle-age by nothing worse than a few streaks 
of white. I remember walking upstairs to the 
banquet room of a New York hotel with an emi- 
nent preacher some years ago. As we came to the 
landing he paused to recover his breath. ‘I don’t 
know if it is because I am fifty years of age,” he 
said, ‘but somehow I can’t do this kind of work 
as easily as I used to.” A few months later he 
was dead. For ten years he had been gradually 
slipping into physical bankruptcy, yet he made no 
change in his habits and took what his physician 
told him only half seriously. It was not because 
he was fifty years of age that his body failed him, 
but because, being fifty, he still spent himself as 
if he had been a healthy man of thirty. He had 
refused to see the signs of warning nature was set- 
ting in his path. 

It is possible to postpone the frailties of old 
age, or at least to prevent their coming on us too 
soon. It cannot be done with the dye-bottle or 
the tweezers; it is a matter of careful thought and 
adaptation. Let the man who would preserve his 
physical vigor as long as possible deny himself and 
exert himself as any physician will direct him; let 
him realize that he is past the time when excesses 


72 


A LOOK IN THE’ MIRROR 


leave no trace behind and that he must now apply 
intelligence and self-control to his daily life, and 
though his birthdays still insist on coming, they 
will find him prepared and will bring him wisdom 
instead of weakness. 

The Prophet, however, was thinking of the 
moral and religious life when he made his obser- 
vation. The unconscious deterioration of men 
and women in spiritual power is a more costly 
thing than their tendency to premature physical 
failure. We are willing that fifty should have less 
physical resiliency than twenty-five; but why should 
fifty be less ardent for the truth? Why should our 
moral convictions grow flabby because a few years 
have passed? We do not expect gray hair to 
adorn a champion athlete; but a hoary head should 
be a crown of glory to any man or woman who 
has lived through the years with the accruing 
moral power that is the mark of true experience. 

The decline of the moral powers steals on us 
even more insidiously than does the waning of our 
physical strength. We all know that our bodies 
wax old, or if we forget it, some physician will 
jog our memory the first time we fall ill and will 
make disquieting experiments with heart action 
and blood pressure. But spiritual senility steals 
upon us with no outward sign. We slip back im- 
perceptibly and our spiritual doctors, though they 
may see our plight and long to tell us, are not often 
called into consultation. 


73 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


It is told of a famous Scotch preacher that he 
used to put his hand on a boy’s head and ask, 
“Well, laddie, how is’t wi’ your soul th’ morn?” 
It would be well for many a man and woman in 
middle life if someone could bring them to serious 
consideration of that question. We ask each other 
about business and about physical health; but any 
interest in the welfare of our friends’ immortal 
selves is not to be expressed in polite conversa- 
tion. As we increase in years we ought to grow 
in moral power and in spiritual competency. The 
years should not rob us of our character. ‘There 
should be no sagging of our spirit as youth de- 
parts. One can predict what your body will be 
when you are seventy; it will be less resilient, less 
resistant, weaker than it is at forty. But what 
will your moral and spiritual life be? Whither 
are you tending in these deeper parts of your na- 
ture? There is no greater tragedy in human life 
than the decay of the character with increasing 
age. Nothing is less glorious than the hoary head 
when not found in the way of righteousness. ‘The 
people in the books of George Eliot seem all to 
deteriorate as they grow older. Did the author 
believe that old age and moral perversity grow on 
men together? With many who have given prom- 
ise in the years of youth it has undoubtedly been 
so. Had Henry the Eighth died at the age of 
thirty, he would have been counted a bright star in 
the galaxy of English monarchs, but with middle- 


i 


ALO OR EN DH By Mr R ROm 


life he lost the vision of his kingship and fell into 
those evil ways which have made him a byword 
of history. How differently men would think of 
Benedict Arnold had he died in early middle-age 
when he still held and deserved the esteem of his 
countrymen. Had you died ten years ago, would 
men remember you more reverently than they 
would do if your soul were required of you this 
night? Let us look at ourselves honestly, that we 
may know how the passing years are leaving us. 
There will be no achievement of true happiness 
to the man who falls into moral bankruptcy in 
midlife. 

‘De Profundis” was written by Oscar Wilde. 
It is the heart-broken confession of a man who 
passed down the road of life, careless of his desti- 
nation, a man gifted with great talent, but with- 
out the gift of moral strength. So from high dis- 
tinction he fell into deep disgrace and dishonored 
death. The book is a thing of blood and tears 
and tragedy. “Desire at the end was a malady 
or a madness or both,” he writes. “I ceased to be 
lord over myself. I was no longer captain of my 
soul and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to 
dominate me. [ ended in horrible disgrace.” 

Such tragedies happen, not in youth but in 
middle-age. We talk of the temptations of youth; 
but they are not to be compared to the temptations 
that come to men and women when youth is just 
past. At this time we are thrown on our own 


vis 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


resources. We are our own masters. Our old 
guides have passed on to the beyond and our old 
loyalties are but memories. At this time we have 
command of our own lives and can do what we 
will. Many middle-aged people find themselves 
with more money than they have ever had before, 
and then the temptation to indulge in what money 
will buy faces them. Domestic happiness 1s 
wrecked most often in the forties. Divorce is a 
middle-aged affair. Habits become not only fixed 
but tyrannical. Men smoke too much, drink too 
much and eat too much in these years when they 
should be gaining greater knowledge of themselves 
and greater skill in self-control. 

It is at this time that we abandon the bright 
hopes of youth. The realization of our own limi- 
tations comes upon us. We can never fulfill our 
dreams. We have come thus far on the journey 
of life and, behold, what we took for sparkling 
waters we discover to be but the dry sands of the 
desert. Disappointment with life is common at 
this period. Our copy-book maxims have not 
proved adequate. We doubt whether honesty be 
the best policy when we see the dishonest prosper. 
Our faith in the moral law wavers and even if we 
do not abandon our principles we are tempted to 
doubt their finality. We become morally tolerant 
and cease trying to set the world right. Losing 
our moral vision, we persuade ourselves that we 
are becoming worldly wise. The old ardor for 


76 


ALO OKDN PAE MuRRO-R 


the things of the spirit, and for the redemption of 
life, leaves us and we tell ourselves that in yield- 
ing to indolence we have put on the mantle of 
charity. 

“Fight a good fight!” That call rings out in 
the Bible again and again. If you feel inclined to 
enter on a middle-age of easy compliance, be 
warned that this is the way of spiritual decay. We 
must keep the element of resistance in our lives, 
lest we lose our manhood. You cannot make a 
story unless you begin with conflict and carry it on 
to the issue of conquest or defeat. Nor can you 
make a life on any other terms. If you are not 
fighting, you are not living. If you have settled 
back into the softness of your nest, you are begin- 
ning to die. 

There are hosts of unhappy, discontented mid- 
dle-aged people with whom there is nothing wrong 
save that they are too comfortable. They kill 
their bodies with rich food and easy chairs and 
they destroy the soul with self-indulgence. They 
need the element of attack and resistance. If they 
would be happy they must, like the patriarch of 
old, go to grips with the messenger of the Al- 
mighty and keep on wrestling until they get their 
blessing. 

Is life becoming a bore to you? Are people 
increasingly uninteresting? Do simple amuse- 
ments grow staler and staler? Are irritations 
more and more frequent? You blame the people 


Al 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


around you for such conditions. ‘The town is not 
what once it was, the neighbors are not as con- 
genial as they were a dozen years ago. You won- 
der why it is that your relations with your wife 
or your husband are less warm and intimate than 
formerly. The preacher has grown prosy of late. 
You spend your time in church thinking of business 
or of golf. You have ceased to count in the best 
life of your community. The whole round of 
spiritual privilege has become dull and uninter- 
esting. Do you realize that the reason for all 
this is in yourself? Consider whether you are not 
becoming morally and spiritually flabby. Just as 
your girth has increased and you have put on soft 
flesh, which indicates not health, but self-indul- 
gence, so your moral force has been undermined 
by want of exercise and you allow yourself to be 
drawn into things which once your soul abhorred. 
Isn’t it time that you pulled yourself up? 

To let the years despoil us of our courage and 
our faith is the most ignominious of all failures. 
One may lose his money and get it back again, but 
he who squanders character in the years of middle- 
age has lost that which is harder than gold to re- 
gain. We need to be warned lest we allow our- 
selves to be stricken with a kind of sickness which 
is worse than any physical disease. “I don’t know 
if it is because I am fifty years of age,” remarked 
my friend as he climbed those stairs. No, it was 
not because he was fifty years of age. ‘The real 


78 


Be Ou IN Be MUD RRO. 


reason was that he had preferred ignorance when 
any one of a dozen physicians within ten minutes’ 
walk of his home would have warned him. He 
had been eating too much, smoking too much, ex- 
ercising too little, disregarding the needs and de- 
mands of a body that had been wearing itself out 
in a busy professional life. It is so that thousands 
of middle-aged men destroy the priceless gift of 
physical health by obstinate neglect. And it ts 
equally true of us in our treatment of our im- 
mortal selves. The Great Physician would teach 
us to keep young and vigorous in that life of lives 
that is of the spirit. Amid the responsibilities of 
middle life the cultivation of our spiritual selves 
is even more important than it was in youth. Let 
us then look to ourselves. Your wife peers into 
the mirror with anxiety expressed in every feature 
as she searches for gray hairs in her head and 
you have taken, of late, to reading advertisements 
of correspondence courses in physical training. 
But what of that which transcends the body? Do 
men think of you as one who once could be de- 
pended on for help in the promotion of good 
endeavors, but whose name must now be regret- 
fully erased from the list of those who count? 
Are you a better man or a worse, with the passing 
of the years? 

“Be not weary with well-doing.”’ Of all the 
misadventures of life, the heedless retrogression 
our pious fathers called backsliding is the worst. 


79 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


It is to him who, year after year, holds fast to 
those things which are good, to him who endures 
through the labors and temptations of a busy life, 
to him who keeps the faith through all the vicissi- 
tudes of earthly fortune that the crown of life be- 
longs. It is this man who shall go down into a 
green old age. “His leaf also shall not wither, 
and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.” 


So 


A DEFENSE OF DISORDER 


GREATNESS is never neat-minded. One’s mind 
revolts at the thought of Samuel Johnson in me- 
ticulous linen, white spats and a monocle, or of 
Abraham Lincoln in anything but an attitude of 
careless indifference toward the minutie of self- 
adornment and deportment. We do not want our 
heroes to be dandies, either in dress or in man- 
ners. There is little comfort in a house wherein 
order and correctness come first in considera- 
tion. The living-room of a home should be 
easy, like an old pair of shoes. A good house- 
keeper and a good homemaker differ in that one 
thinks of the house while the other cares for the 
people who live in it; one keeps the place neat and 
the other keeps the family comfortable. When a 
bed is ‘“‘made”’ it is no place for sleeping; by the 
time we have relaxed and invited sleep the bed is 
usually well rumpled up. 

Of course, we cannot get on without order, but 
neither can we get on without disorder. Conven- 
tions are invented for the purpose of getting small 
concerns out of the way without effort. When 
you meet a lady in the street, you go through a 
little ritual, raising your hat and bowing, and you 
pass on, having paid her a proper attention with- 

81 


CHARA GT BRR AWN Di i AP Ea 


out disturbing the trend of your thoughts. If you 
were obliged, every time you met an acquaintance, 
to invent some greeting exactly appropriate to the 
occasion, you would soon take to the alleyways to 
save yourself from mental breakdown. The same 
thing is true of all our social contacts. What we 
call good manners is simply a convenient code of 
signals, indicating that we wish to be amiable 
toward our neighbor. A civilized man may bow; 
a savage may rub his stomach; it means the same 
thing. We have our little coins of conventional 
exchange in conversation, about the weather, the 
new poetry and each other’s health. ‘There are 
times when we want to plunge into real conversa- 
tion, to discuss the unknowable, and, as that rest- 
less spirit, Gail Hamilton, once put it, to “poss the 
impossible”; but there are other times when it is 
restful to talk about the obvious, to make the stock 
remarks and return the stock replies. Tonight, at 
a thousand dinner tables the same observations 
about the present company, the weather, the bol- 
sheviki and the latest novel will be made by ten 
thousand people and, when it is all over and they 
bid good-night to their hostess, they will be quite 
sincere, one and all, in remarking that they have 
had a Jovely time. How tiresome it would be if 
they were obliged to tell her exactly, precisely, as 
Henry James might have done it, what kind of a 
time they have had. 

But we are tempted to slip into the convenient 

82 


mo DEFENSE: OF DISORDER 


track of convention overmuch. A life that is codi- 
fied too much is in danger either of drying up and 
withering or of breaking out in some devastating 
violation of the moral law. We must preserve the 
power of spontaneous enjoyment of the passing 
hour and never give ourselves altogether to a set 
régime. With too many of us, duties and occu- 
pations through which we go mechanically fill our 
days. One day is like unto another and there is, 
for us, nothing new under the sun, because we 
have become too neat, too methodical and too in- 
dolent to attempt to know the unknowable or to 
“poss the impossible.” 

On one occasion, Jesus was talking about 
prayer. ‘Use not vain repetitions as the heathen 
do,” he said. The people he has in mind have 
ceased to wrestle with mystery. They have poured 
life into a mold and have no living aspirations or 
compelling ambitions; so they give utterance to old 
thoughts and old wants supplied them by tradition. 
They express their religious convictions always in 
the same set of sentences and the longer they use 
them, the less they think about them. But, ac- 
cording to His teaching, religion can never be 
truly so expressed. It must not stiffen into con- 
vention, it must be a mercy that is new every morn- 
ing, it must be as fresh and fragrant as the new- 
blown lily of the field. 

The warning comes to us with equal force in 
regard to other parts of our lives. You may be a 


83 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


man of such regularity of habit that your neigh- 
bors set their clocks by your coming and going. 
You rise at a certain hour in the morning, emerge 
from the bathroom so many minutes later, sit 
down to breakfast and consume a certain number 
of slices of bacon and a certain quantity of coffee, 
every morning, year in and year out. You take 
your hat from a certain peg in the hatrack and 
emerge from your door at a certain minute, to go 
down town to business by a certain route. You 
spend the day going through the same motions 
you have gone through every day for fifteen years. 
You meet the same people, say good morning in 
the same tone, hang your hat in the same place, 
sit at the same desk and dictate letters in the same 
set of phrases. When lunchtime comes you go to 
the same restaurant and sit at the table with the 
same set of cronies. It is Tuesday, and you or- 
der what you have eaten every Tuesday as long as 
you can remember. One shudders at such a life 
when he really looks at it and realizes that it is 
more monotonous than the life of a sheep. As 
you regard your immortal soul, never let the 
pattern of your days become a mere conventional 
design, stiff, fixed, unnatural and unbeautiful. It 
is well to be warned. 

How long is it since anything happened to you? 
The only adventure many people have is illness. 
Perhaps we had an attack of influenza. We talk 
about it more than Wellington talked about the 


84 


> =o = 


i DE ME Ns Be Or Drs 0 RD R 


Battle of Waterloo and our friends grow weary 
of hearing that it was fully six weeks before we 
recovered our strength. If one has sacrificed his 
vermiform appendix to the gods of surgical sci- 
ence, let him be silent, let it be a part of the un- 
speakable past, lest, every time he begins, ““When 
I was in the hospital,” his friends shall be tempted 
to wish that the surgeon had proved a bungler. 
Use not vain repetitions! Our friends grow weary 
of hearing about Susie, who is ‘“‘such a nervous 
child—I don’t know what I am going to do with 
her.” ‘They have heard quite enough about the 
puncture we had on our timid little automobile 
trip last summer, about the peculiar temperament 
of our furnace and the kind of coal we burn, and 
about the fact that we can’t eat a thing for break- 
fast except a slice of toast. Surely life is poor 
when it contains nothing more worth a moment’s 
thought than these things. 

Some years ago a French clergyman published a 
widely read book on the Simple Life. One might 
make an equally useful contribution to the art of 
living with a work on the bromidic life, the life of 
vain repetitions, the life of ruts and habits, the 
life into which so many excellent people drift and 
become dead while they live. We can easily recog- 
nize the symptoms of bromiditus. When we have 
it we become like pianos, which always respond 
with a certain note to pressure on a certain key. 
In winter we say that we feel the cold less in the 


85 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


northern part of the country than we do here be- 
cause ‘‘the cold is so dry up there.” ‘That illu- 
minating meteorological observation is made on 
every cold day in every part of the country, from 
Texas to Minnesota. In summer we say that it is 
not so much the heat as the humidity that causes 
us discomfort. We look at works of art and say 
we do not know much about them, but we know 
what we like. In literature, we declare in favor 
of the happy ending because “there is enough sad- 
ness in real life without reading it in books.” We 
become venders of proverbs and announce on every 
favorable occasion that two is company and three’s 
a crowd, that boys will be boys, that it takes all 
kinds of people to make a world, that where there’s 
a will there’s a way, and that every cloud has a 
silver lining. 

This is a condition of mental stagnation into 
which many otherwise intelligent people sink. 
They think and speak in patterns. With them 
complacency is always smug; pointing is always 
done with pride and viewing with alarm. They 
are the people who applaud most vociferously the 
set and uninspired speeches of the professional 
patrioteers. With them what actors call “sure 
fire hokum”’ is always good for a round of ap- 
plause. When they go to church they like a ser- 
mon in which the preacher, who on Saturday has 
obeyed the scriptural injunction to take no thought 
for the morrow, repeats in order certain well- 


86 


BD EH EEN S'E O/B) eDi LS O'R D Bik 


beloved and moss-grown phrases. Ah, they tell 
each other, this man preaches the Gospel! As if 
the Gospel of Jesus Christ could ever be conven- 
tionalized ! 

We need to remember that civilizations have 
sickened and died of conventions. Dead languages 
are languages which do not change and in which 
each word has crystallized into an invariable 
meaning. Live languages are those in which 
changes take place with each passing generation. 
Curiously enough, what purists call corruptions in 
language are, in fact, infusions of new life. ‘They 
are like the new blood without which the strongest 
breed dies out. So with the lives of individual 
men and women. ‘There must be constant open- 
ings of new avenues of interest, constant discov- 
eries of new outlets for personality; the character 
must grow and change as all things that are alive 
must grow and change. 

We should not spend our lives going through 
familiar, thoughtless motions, like a parcel of chil- 
dren doing calesthenics in a schoolroom. ‘The dull 
mechanism of life-long, unbroken habit becomes a 
burden that deforms the soul, as the unchanged 
posture of a child at a machine deforms the body. 
It does not matter how much men may praise us 
for our skill in these conventional accomplish- 
ments. The very perfection we have attained in 
them makes them the more wearisome unless we 
have learned to relate them in some way to the 


87 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


ever-changing fortunes and needs of men. This is 
one of the reasons why religion so refreshes life— 
it ties the task to which our circumstances chain 
us to the whole heart-stirring enterprise of hu- 
man service and world salvation. 

Edwin Forrest, the tragedian, played the part 
of ‘“‘Mazeppa”’ for many years. Whenever Shakes- 
pere failed him or the public proved cold to his 
newer undertakings, he had only to fall back on 
this play to renew his prosperity and fame; yet 
though the public gave him a fortune for playing 
the part, he hated it with the hatred of a man who 
is chained to a task from which he cannot escape. 
‘‘An ingenious artist of our time,” says Hazlitt in 
his table talk, “has declared that if ever the Devil 
got him into his clutches he would set him to copy- 
ing his own pictures.’’ When our spiritual vitality 
has so exhausted itself that there is nothing for 
us to do but copy our own pictures we may well 
be tempted to hate life. 

We come, all too easily, to take ourselves and 
our circumstances for granted. We talk about 
our ‘‘disposition’” as if it were a fixed and un- 
changeable thing. If we are pessimistic, nervous, 
critical, indolent or bad-tempered, we accept the 
fact as a man might accept bow-legs or a big 
nose. A time comes when we are in danger of 
ceasing to make ourselves, when we settle to cer- 
tain habits, certain enjoyments, views of life, and 
limitations of endeavor. To take one’s self for 

88 


Pe Re HAN -§. Be Orb” 7D: 1s © RID Ea 


granted, as if all our history and environment had 
conspired to make us what we are, and we were 
helpless in the matter, is one of the commonest of 
the sins against self. 

In every life there are certain occasions which 
should stimulate us to new powers. ‘Thy mer- 
cies,” says the Psalmist, “are new every morn- 
ing.” God speaks to us in every new-born day 
inviting us to untried conquests. In every change 
that comes to our lives He urges us to build into 
ourselves new powers. Do you remember a boy- 
hood or girlhood of poverty? The change in 
your circumstances has brought you a better house 
to live in, a better position in society, better clothes, 
more physical comfort in every way; but has it 
brought you anything else? As you gain a bigger 
income do you live a bigger life? Or if the re- 
verse has been true, and you have declined from 
affluence to a pittance, has poverty brought you 
only privation and discontent or has it brought 
you some of its own peculiar insights and oppor- 
tunities? As we pass from one period of life to 
another, there should be an ever-accruing ability 
to find, within the resisting crust of circumstances, 
the inner poem of existence. ‘The abundant life 
is a life that never settles to the resigned recep- 
tion of the endlessly dreary. In the kingdom of 
heaven, monotony is unknown. 

As we must never take ourselves for granted, 
so must we never take God for granted. ‘The 


89 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


Divine is endless variety. He endures in the ador- 
ation of man through all the vicissitudes of the cen- 
turies, because his beauty is as changeful as the 
beauty of a sunset. The boy sees in Him one life, 
the man another. With every accession of wisdom 
we see new meanings in the revelation of God. 
If religion has become a settled, uninteresting 
thing to you, then seek its truth in new fields. 
Find new tasks for the spirit, venture on new 
hopes, cultivate new aspirations, assimilate new 
truth, learn to see the force in new arguments, and 
to appreciate the value of new discoveries. If we 
must have any of the characteristics of childhood 
in order to receive the kingdom of God, surely we 
must have that exhaustless curiosity which is so 
invariably characteristic of the young. 

When Jesus called us to himself, he called us to 
discipleship. A disciple is a learner. When we 
cease to learn, life has lost its savor. When the 
appetite of the mind is dulled and we no longer 
crave to know, we are more to be pitied than men 
who have ceased to relish material food. Isaiah 
said, ‘‘He wakeneth my ear every morning to hear 
as alearner.”’ It is in that attitude of alert listen- 
ing to new lessons that our middle years shall be 
made triumphant. ‘What are you doing now?” 
a man asked a retired Professor of Hebrew, who 
for forty years had been a specialist in Old Testa- 
ment study. “I’m discovering the Old Testa- 
ment,’ was the answer. It is just so that a busi- 


gO 


A DEFENSE OF DISORDER 


ness man may make discoveries in business, a pro- 
fessional man in his profession, a parent in his 
children. Any man or woman in the world may 
find in each new day a new adventure and in every 
rising sun a promise of new things. Middle-age 
becomes dull as dishwater because men cease to 
have expectations. The coming day allures us 
with no mystery. We know in advance just what 
is going to happen. We may get away from this 
deadly obviousness for a few hours by going fish- 
ing or playing golf—indeed, golf and fishing are 
middle-age sports mainly because they satisfy, for 
the moment, men’s hunger for uncertainty. But 
those who are really caught in the machinery of 
the daily round can seldom afford even these tem- 
porary adventures. If they are to find zest again, 
they must find it in the same old setting. And it 
is there if only they will believe it. 

‘Use not vain repetitions,” said Jesus. There 
are repetitions that are not vain. Some things 
cannot be repeated too often. But life must not 
be suffered to become a mere neatly arranged 
schedule of conventions, like a “‘living-room’”’ made 
unlivable by an inflexible housekeeper. Let life 
be new and potent, however years have passed us 
by. Fling off the tyranny of petty habit. Unlim- 
ber the mind and unfetter the ambitions. Wear 
a different color, think a different thought, read a 
different kind of book, search the dictionary and 
find new words to use, surprise your palate with 


gl 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


an unaccustomed flavor and you will find that even 
these mild adventures will add to the joy of living. 
If your existence loses, by the process, a little of 
its usual rigid order, count it all joy that you have 
released yourself from prison. 

“But,” you object, harking back to your beloved 
old saws, “‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” 

Yes, you can, my friend. ‘That proverb was 
invented by some man who knew nothing about 
dogs. Besides, I am not talking about an old dog; 
I am talking about you. 


92 


OCTOGENARIAN ENTERPRISE 


WE have heard of men who wanted the earth, 
but never of a man who got it. There is a story 
in the Bible, however, of a man past eighty who 
claimed what was, to his mind, a considerable part 
of it, and who got what he asked for. His name 
was Caleb. In the days of the wilderness wander- 
ing he was one of the trusted advisors of Moses. 
Now, at eighty-five, at a time of life when most 
men are preparing to die as peacefully as may be, 
he comes to Joshua with his request. ‘I was forty 
years old,” he says, “when Moses sent me to spy 
out this land, and I brought him such word as was 
in my heart; and Moses promised on that day that 
this mountain should be my inheritance and the 
inheritance of my children. I am eighty-five years 
old, but I am strong now as I was then. Now, 
therefore, give me this mountain; and though it 
be full of giants and though the cities be great and 
walled, yet if the Lord be with me, I shall make it 
my own.” ‘Thereupon, we are told, “Joshua 
blessed him and gave unto Caleb, Hebron for an 
inheritance,’ and the old man made it so uncom- 
fortable for the swaggering Anakim, who inhabited 
it, that they were glad enough to pack up and 
leave the mountain to the doughty old warrior. 


93 


CHARACTER AND GHAR PIN Eos 


Of course, there is a bit of boastfulness in this 
old man. We may very justly doubt that he was 
really as strong in body and as keen of eye as he 
had been forty-five years before. After all, time 
does things to the human body; the joints stiffen; 
the vision dims; the arteries harden; the years 
take their toll of our physical nature; but, in 
Caleb, the indomitable spirit is still sovereign. 
The body may be old; but will and purpose have 
outlasted all the years. We rather like to see a 
little swagger in an old man. We enjoy his con- 
fidence in himself. The fine old fellow who re- 
tains the hearty freshness of his spirit, who re- 
fuses to lie down in ineffective senility, who laughs 
like a boy and who still enjoys a bit of a fight on 
occasion, is the man whose company we most en- 
joy. Youth has no freshness like that of unwith- 
ered age. Edward Simmons, the artist, writing 
when seventy years of age, says, “I do not wish 
to belong to my own generation. ‘Whom the gods 
love die young’ does not mean that they die when 
they are young but that they are young when they 
die, and I could ask nothing better from a gener- 
ous creator.” 

What man is so interesting as the octogenarian 
whose eight decades of pilgrimage have left him 
still a lover of life and of his kind, still an optim- 
ist, still keenly alive to the events of today, still 
_ susceptible to the new idea, still holding fast to the 
things that time has proved to be good; but still 


94 


OCTOGENARIAN ENTERPRISE 


interested in proving new things? John Bigelow, 
Mark Twain, Chauncey Depew, Charles Park- 
hurst, Elihu Root, Joseph Choate—these are a 
few of the fine old boys of recent years who have 
shed a light of hope and faith on their world long 
after they passed threescore and ten. One of the 
most charming characteristics of such men is their 
cheerful blindness to the fact that they are old. 
Like Caleb, they insist that the weight of years is 
nothing. One loves to dip into John Bigelow’s 
tremendous tomes of more than a million words 
of reminiscence, realizing that he finished them 
when past ninety. We are told that when John 
Morley was Secretary for Ireland he was past 
seventy. Gladstone was eighty-four. Morley 
wanted to remove the President of a certain Irish 
college whose work was not satisfactory, and he 
finally wrote a letter directing the retirement of 
the man on the score of his being past the age of 
sixty-five. Lord Salisbury remarked, “I observe 
that the letter directing retirement because this 
college president is sixty-five is signed by a secre- 
tary whose is seventy-something in the name of a 
first Lord of the Treasury who is eighty-four.” 
One can imagine John Morley’s surprise and re- 
sentment that anyone should thus remind the world 
of a fact so irrelevant as the number of his birth- 
days. 

Joseph Chamberlain said of his father, “He 
never rested. To his last day he seemed too 


95 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


young to leave things as they are.” ‘There is a 
pseudo-wisdom of old age which is a mere with- 
drawing from active participation in human affairs. 
Some old men become indolent by-standers, shak- 
ing their heads and reflecting that if all men were 
as old and wise as they, no one would get excited 
about anything. ‘They no longer take sides, they 
live in a non-partisan attitude and they imagine 
that it is the wisdom of old age that explains their 
want of aggressive interest in the affairs of life. 
Old man Caleb was given to no such lazy self- 
indulgence. He felt responsible, at eighty-five, as 
he had been at forty, to fight the battles of the 
Lord. He sniffed the conflict from afar and, 
though age may have dimmed his sight, it did not 
diminish his enthusiasm. 

Many old people would be happier if they would 
continue to be useful. It may very well be true 
that a man has reached the time when he ought to 
lay down some of his burdens; but he need not lay 
them all down. He need not cease to serve be- 
cause he has grown too old to command. Here 
and there we see one who has grace sufficient to 
step down-from the high place when increasing 
years make it advisable, and to take less exacting 
service. Why should one wear out his last days 
in rusty idleness when he could, if he would, do 
genuine service in some small place? ‘There is no 
joy in sitting listless, trying to maintain the pres- 
tige of days that are gone. And may not we who 

96 


OCTOGENARIAN ENTERPRISE 


are younger receive a hint at this point? In our 
solicitude for the aged we are often cruel, rob- 
bing them of all opportunity to be useful, dis- 
counting their wisdom, adopting an attitude of 
kindly patronage with them, when we might pro- 
mote their happiness by laying on them such bur- 
dens as they are still well able to bear. There is 
probably no prouder moment in any man’s life 
than that when in old age he has done a piece of 
work his sons thought could be accomplished only 
by the strength of youth. Joshua was wise and 
kind when he allowed Caleb to try, as he was 
doubtless surprised when he learned how well the 
old gentleman had succeeded. 

If we are to learn how to be happy, we must 
learn how to lay up for old age. In that time to 
which we all hasten, we shall need not only a bit 
of money; we shall need also something to do and 
something for which to hope. The sixties, seven- 
ties and eighties are fine years for the completion 
of the conquests we conceived in the forties. It is 
in the forties that we lay the foundation for the 
second half of life. If Browning can sing, “‘“Grow 
old along with me; the best is yet to be,”’ it is be- 
cause he labored in life’s midsummer for the har- 
vest of the autumn. It is interesting to observe 
middle-aged men giving sage advice to the young 
about taking thought for the responsibilities of 
middle life while they themselves squander in irra- 
tional living the heritage of their old age. A man 


yi 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


must lay up something more than money; he must 
build within himself the resources of his future 
happiness. 

The main difference between us is not merely 
that some of us have succeeded and some of us 
have failed; but that some of us have kept our 
dominant purpose alive and active and others 
have allowed it to die. The man who in the latter 
half of life fulfills the dreams of his youth is the 
man who never loses sight of his great intention. 
To him there is always one achievement more to 
be desired than any other, some one thing of 
which it is his constant thought, ‘‘For this cause 
came I forth.” ‘The thing that makes Caleb 
worth preaching about is not so much that he 
finally drove out the Anakim as that he never let 
go of his purpose to do so. It is this tenacity of 
intention that makes men great. 

It is in middle life that we become conscious of 
our limitations and of the difficulties of the thing 
we dreamed of doing. We try once or twice or 
half a dozen times and fail. Then we say, “‘Alas, 
I am not fit to do the thing I thought to do. Jam 
getting older, youth is past, I must accept defeat.” 
A man finds that the cost of living is growing 
greater, that his responsibilities tend to increase 
faster than his income, that domestic cares occupy 
more and more of his thought. Circumstances 
seem to close in about him like a prison and gradu- 
ally his courage flags. He becomes timid, tired 


98 


OCTOGENARIAN ENTERPRISE 


and unenterprising. His life becomes insipid be- 
cause the purpose which was the one thing that 
dignified his existence has been allowed to slip out 
of his thinking. ‘‘Once I hoped to do so and so,” 
he says. “I was ambitious, but I find that the 
heights I chose were not for my feet and I leave 
them to abler men.” So he sighs resignedly, sup- 
presses the upward yearnings of his soul and lives 
on, a failure. 

Another may climb no higher than he, but he 
never ceases to try. Heis always a climber. His 
mountain is always before him and he sees it while 
he toils along the rugged valleys. Its conquest is 
not the outcome of an hour’s consideration; his 
perseverance depends not on the day’s casual 
choice. It is all the outcome of a life of valorous 
manhood. Forty-five years before the morning 
when Caleb went to Joshua, Moses had sent him 
with other men to spy out the land. Caleb was 
then a middle-aged man. When the spies returned, 
it was his voice that urged on the enterprise. While 
his companions melted the hearts of the people 
with their fear, he gave them new courage. It 
was because of his brave faith that they went for- 
ward to the promised land. So when he speaks 
today, at eighty-five, he simply speaks the words 
dictated by his life of two score years before. If 
old age is a time of whining pessimism, of lapsed 
interests, of broken friendships, of narrow preju- 
dices and of soured faith, it is because middle age 


99 


CHARACTE RYAN D HAPPINESS 


has somewhere failed. To lay up financial com- 
petence for a rainy day is only half our task; we 
must prepare for ourselves an inner source of 
cheerfulness which shall keep us from whining 
about the weather, the inconsiderateness of the 
young and the refusal of time to stand still. 

The years pass and you admit that you are not 
as young as you used to be; but the mountain is 
still there, waiting for you. It is your mountain, 
the dream of your youth, the opportunity of your 
age. Why not make it your own in the time that 
is left? It is quite possible that you may fail; but 
you will be the happier for trying and continuing 
to try. 


100 


THE SOLVENT LIFE 


THERE is a parable in the New Testament on 
the theme of solvency. “Which of you, intending 
to build a tower, doth not first sit down to count 
the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?” 
One is tempted to use a mixed terminology when 
speaking of the solvent life, for it is difficult to 
penetrate into the causes of human bankruptcy and 
still keep clear the common distinctions between 
a man’s money, his morals and his mentality. 
They ought not to be thought of as separated 
things. When the Apostle John prayed that all 
the concerns of his friend Gaius might be as healthy 
as his soul, he was praying for nothing more than 
a logical progress in the growth of a good man. 
No solvency is secure, whether of body or mind 
or business, which is not the outcome of a compe- 
tent plan of life and the expression of a character 
that is sound. The fact that worthless people 
sometimes have luck is no argument against this 
generalization. 

Mr. Micawber’s celebrated dictum on the rela- 
tion of financial solvency to happiness is unde- 
niable. When you spend a shilling more than you 
get, you buy your self-indulgence, not only with 
another’s money but with your own chances of a 

IOI 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


happy life. Bankruptcy, however, is not always 
a matter of self-indulgence. However industrious 
and self-denying a man may be; however rich and 
prosperous, he is never altogether immune to those 
accumulating mischances which may culminate in 
the bankruptcy courts. Like Antonio, in the Mer- 
chant of Venice, the most successful man in the 
community may easily come to disaster by taking 
for granted the soundness of his fortunes. “Ships 
are but boards, sailors but men; there be land 
thieves and water thieves; and then there is the 
peril of the waters, waves and rocks.”’ All these, 
to say nothing of Shylock himself who only waits 
for the occasion to exact his pound of flesh, are 
ever present perils in the path of the prosperous. 
A glance into the secret history of most great busi- 
ness firms would reveal times when they avoided 
a smash only by costly measures. Bankruptcy is a 
common disaster. Something like twenty thou- 
sand business failures will doubtless take place 
during this business year in this country and every 
community has its families who once were rich 
and who now live in a pathetic effort to keep up 
the old “position” on the bits of wreckage that 
were saved. 

But the parable of Jesus relates to something 
more than money and business. It penetrates to 
the deeper self. If we may imagine a group of 
business men listening to Him as he expounds the 
necessity for a solvent life, so we may address 

102 


HEE SO dav Ee NE Dee DE: 


ourselves now to those who understand the essen- 
tials of successful profit-making. For success in 
any field, or in all fields, must be gained by the 
same method, whether we seek it in building tow- 
ers, selling dry-goods, painting pictures or achiev- 
ing happiness. It will not come of itself; it must 
be the logical, the inevitable outcome of a clear 
purpose and a sound method. The world is strewn 
with human wrecks who have enjoyed a season of 
lucky prosperity but who, neither knowing nor 
caring for the underlying laws of success and fail- 
ure, have come to ruin. 

What are the ingredients of a solvent life? The 
first is capital. It is obvious that every business 
failure is chargeable at last to a want of that with 
which to pay for what has been bought. In one 
third of the business failures that take place this 
want of capital is the original cause—the people 
involved never had resources sufficient to make 
success a logical outcome. Had they been particu- 
larly fortunate, they might have succeeded, but 
they took long chances. A second cause of com- 
mercial failure is more or less general disaster, 
when one firm goes down and carries others with 
it. [he third main cause is incompetency, a want 
of knowledge of those principles and details which 
alone give one a right to expect success. Other 
causes are misplaced confidence, personal extrava- 
gance and plain neglect; but the first three are 

103 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


responsible for three-fourths of the bankruptcy 
cases that fill the courts. 

The same causes underlie moral and spiritual 
failure. The first great necessity is moral capital, 
which we call character. We live successfully in 
accordance with the wisdom and the self-denial 
with which we have laid up this capital in years 
past. Happiness is not an accident; it is an out- 
come. Back of every successful life there is accu- 
mulation. Just as a boy saves his pennies in or- 
der that he may buy a pair of skates from which 
he expects a return in pleasure, so men save and 
invest, in order that they may have what they 
want. ‘This is understood by every man when he 
lays up money; but multitudes would be happier 
if they understood how closely it applies to the 
building up of the inner life. Character is the 
capital on which we do business in that realm where 
success means blessedness. Like material wealth, 
it is a cumulative thing; but, unlike money, each 
of us must get it for himself. Sometimes men are 
born in possession of great fortunes, which wait 
for them until the day when they shall be adjudged 
competent to manage and conserve them; but there 
are no trust companies to save our reputations or 
to build up our moral resources for us until we 
get ready to care for them ourselves. There are 
those who will guide us and help us; but only we 
can make our own character. We may be rich 
simply because our fathers were rich; but no man 

104 


TREES OU Vier Nesting Th 16 Bees 


is good simply because his father was good. It is 
by the inner industry of the soul that we build up 
the capital of character on which life must be 
founded, and no man will make a success of life 
by laying up treasures on earth while he neglects 
the kingdom of heaven which is within. The first 
essential of solvency is that we shall build up and 
conserve our moral capital. 

Unsuccessful merchants are usually poor buy- 
ers. When the receiver takes inventory of a 
bankrupt’s stock he finds a large proportion of 
trash. Itis exactly soinlife. ‘Why do you spend 
your money for that which is not bread?” cries 
the Prophet. Why load your life with worthless 
accumulations? How much of that which makes 
up your life is trash? What are you getting for 
the time you spend when you pass an evening in 
your habitual way? What kind of dividends will 
your habits pay in old age? “Prove all things,” 
says Paul, ‘‘hold fast to that which is good.” The 
careful merchant scrutinizes each article offered 
him. It must be worth the price, it must be salable 
and it must be of a character consistent with his 
chosen business policy. If he 1s unable to discrimi- 
nate between shoddy and genuine goods, he will 
fail. If he loads his shelves with a meaningless 
mixture of unrelated articles, he will fail. I re- 
member a man in a little mining town who saved 
enough money to set up as a peddler. He used 
to come to the door of the parsonage and call his 

106 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


wares, fresh fish, shoe-polish, green corn, axle- 
grease. One wondered where and why he col- 
lected such messes and one was not surprised to 
see him, before long, perched on the seat of the 
mill-wagon from which he had hoped to escape. 
Our lives must be carefully and consistently 
stocked. One merchant’s stock of five thousand 
dollars may furnish a fine business; another’s of 
ten times the amount may be merely a collection 
of unsalable trash; five hundred books may be a 
library, five thousand may be merely a roomful of 
books; five rooms may be a home, forty may be 
an expensive curiosity shop. A man may fill ten 
hours a day with activity and do nothing; another 
may, like Herbert Spencer, be limited in his task 
to a few hours a day and yet accomplish work at 
which the world marvels. It depends on the intel- 
ligence and skill which we apply to the enterprise 
of living. If a man plays cards for two hours 
after luncheon with his cronies every day, if he 
sits up half the night playing poker, he may be 
ever so amiable and ever so prosperous, but he is 
not the man to make a long-run success of life. 
Every hour so misspent becomes a part of his 
stock in trade in character and must reflect itself 
in his whole activity as time goes on. Wasted 
hours are not merely erased; they are spent for 
something which becomes a part of ourselves. A 
life full of interests which make no contribution 
to our growth in character is like a merchant’s shop 
106 


Da ess OF Mb) Ny TD 


full of unseasonable and shopworn goods. It will 
end at last in moral bankruptcy. 

The second most frequent cause of business fail- 
ure is the fact that bankruptcy is contagious and 
that one failure often causes others. Every 
business man knows the danger of being closely 
tied up with irresponsible concerns; yet in every 
community young business and professional men 
are to be seen spending their leisure hours with 
moral ne’er-do-wells, with spenders and grafters 
whose influence can mean nothing but harm. A 
business man said to a friend, recently, “I had a 
long talk with my wife last night and we agreed 
that we should either have to give up all our pres- 
ent friends or else prepare to go to smash in a few 
years.’ Many a couple would be saved years of 
unhappiness if they would face the situation as 
courageously as that. Young people, wishing to 
get into “society” in the community where busi- 
ness demands that they should live, find easiest 
access to those circles in which questionable prac- 
tices are permitted. If you will look over the 
books of your local country club, you will find that 
the deadheads belong to the sporty crowd, who 
can give you the address of the bootlegger and 
who consider any night wasted that is not devoted 
to pleasure. If you associate with ghat crowd, you 
are on the way to unhappy years. It is not that 
we should have no pleasure in our lives; but just 
as there are times when a business must be reor- 

107 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


ganized and refinanced if it is to avoid bankruptcy, 
so there are times when we need to reorganize 
our homes, when we must cease to be attached to 
useless and unprofitable people and begin the busi- 
ness of living on a new and sounder basis. 

We are living in a time, not only of inflated 
values, but of inflated thinking and inflated con- 
duct. The old things are too slow for the new 
day. Men are triumphantly ignorant of every- 
thing that was thought or written before the 
middle of the nineteenth century. As one has ex- 
pressed it, ‘““A man is a new thinker when he is 
ignorant of what other men have thought.” Here 
is the third cause of bankruptcy, incompetency. 
There is no more need for one going bankrupt in 
his domestic affairs than there is of his plunging 
to ruin financially. It is a matter of competent 
dealing in both cases. When we come to old age 
and life is a failure it is because we have bungled 
it somewhere. 

If a man were to set out to drive from New 
York to San Francisco in an automobile, he would 
acquaint himself, first of all, with the mechanical 
principles by which his machine did its work. He 
would know that violation of the laws which un- 
derlie its mechanism makes trouble certain. Yet 
though there are no spare parts to be had for our 
souls and minds and bodies, we undertake the 
journey of life in blithe ignorance and cheerful 
disregard of the laws which underlie them and 

108 


TOE Bets OLE Veer ING Te A 


which can be ignored only at the risk of final ruin. 
The automobile driver may leave the care of his 
machine to the man in the garage; but the time 
will come when the garage man will not be avail- 
able. Exactly so do many of us leave the care 
of our living selves to the doctor and the minister; 
but the time will come when, because he have 
failed to achieve a competency of our own, the 
machine will break down. It is true that there 
are people who seem to have life conducted for 
them and who manage to live comfortably at small 
pains to themselves, but sooner or later they will 
find themselves out on the road with trouble on 
their hands. If we have not taught ourselves the 
principles of successful living and if we have not 
applied those principles in preparation for this 
hour, the chances are that we shall not get our- 
selves out of trouble. 

Emerson said, ‘‘Use all that is called Fortune. 
Most men gamble with her and gain all, and lose 
all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as un- 
lawful these winnings and deal with cause and 
effect, the chancellors of God. In the will work 
and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of 
chance, and thou shalt always drag her after thee; 
a political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of 
your sick, the return of your absent friend, raises 
your spirits, and you think good days are preparing 
for you. Do not believe it. It can never be so. 
Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of 

109 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


principles.” Success and bankruptcy follow given 
laws in business and in life. It is for us to know 
these laws and govern ourselves by them. For- 
mer President Jordan of Stanford University 
once said, speaking of the business of education, 
“Why do the great majority of merchants fail? 
Is it not because they do not know how to suc- 
ceed? Is it not because they do not know that 
there are laws as inexorable as the laws of gravi- 
tation? . . . Half the people in America believe 
this is a world of chance. Half of them believe 
they are the victims of bad luck when they receive 
the rewards of their own stupidity. Half of them 
believe that they are the favorites of fortune and 
will be helped out somehow regardless of what 
they do. . . . There is but one way to earn any- 
thing—that is to find out the laws which govern 
its production and to shape our action in accord- 
ance with those laws.”’ 

If we would keep out of the moral insolvency 
and the domestic bankruptcy toward which some 
of our friends and neighbors are hastening, we 
must have the courage of our own convictions and 
the faith of our own judgment. We must refuse 
to be carried away on the current of extravagance, 
whether it be the extravagance of money spending 
or that extravagance of conduct which seems to be 
a characteristic of our day. Solvency is based 
upon intelligent conservatism. 

When a business man begins to take his business 

IIO 


PEE SOU VE NG E o B 


for granted he begins to fail. Eternal vigilance 
is the price of solvency. Jesus told his disciples 
that it was not sufficient that they should merely 
seek to enter the kingdom of heaven. “Agonize 
to enter the kingdom,” he said, “for I say unto you 
that many of them who seek to enter in shall fail.” 
The solvent life is not easy to live. It is a life of 
constant vigilance, of courageous choosing and of 
self-denial, but it is the only life that can be happy. 


Itt 


THE VINDICATION OF ILLUSION 


I HAVE seen ships bending to the west wind, 
sailing in a clear blue sky. I have looked from a 
mountain top and have seen a great ocean liner 
steaming placidly across the firmament, while 
clouds floated beneath her keel. I have seen a 
shimmering lake in the midst of a waterless des- 
ert. Nor need one go to mountain or desert to 
see these things. A few blocks from the place 
where I write these words, one may look up the 
busy street on a sunny day and see shining waters, 
tossing up spray as passers-by walk through them. 
As street-cars and automobiles pass up the avenue, 
one sees their reflections in the seeming waters; 
but there is no water there; the hard pavement is 
perfectly dry; it is an illusion. 

The mirage is the symbol of disappointment 
among the people of the desert. It invites the 
traveler with views of trees and water and he toils 
to come to it, only to realize, perhaps in the last 
hours of agonizing thirst, that there is nothing 
there but the hot sands of the desert. But, says 
the Prophet Isaiah, “The mirage shall become a 
pool.” It is his high doctrine of faith that, not 
the shrewd calculations of worldliness and prac- 
ticality, but the misty visions of hope, shall be ful- 

Ta12 


THE VINDICATION OF ILLUSION 
filled. The glowing sands which have lured hu- 


manity on through centuries of attempt and fail- 
ure shall yet furnish to the weary traveler the rest 
and refreshment he has sought so long. 

The practical-minded man prides himself on be- 
lieving only what he sees. To be thought vision- 
ary would seem to him disgrace. ‘The slang 
phrase, ‘‘show me,” is an expression of that hard- 
headed, cautious, worldly skepticism which is so 
characteristic of the man who disdains the visions 
of faith. 

But, after all, one could easily “show you” the 
ships floating in the sky and the shimmering lake 
in the midst of a sun-baked pavement on the ave- 
nue. You, who are so practical that you believe 
exactly what you see, would be sadly in error if, 
seeing ships in the sky and lakes in the street, you 
should proclaim that they must be there. The 
fact is that sight must always be corrected by faith. 
The things we see are sometimes nonexistent and 
those to which we are often blind are among life’s 
vital realities. Primitive men, believing what they 
saw, thought that the moon was a golden ball some 
twenty-four inches in diameter. They thought 
the sky a vaulted roof over the earth, pierced with 
holes to let through the light which guided them 
on a starry night. One may still find in Japan a 
pile of rocks which once, according to tradition, 
formed the stairs by which men could climb from 
earth to heaven, which was only two miles above 


113 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


the ground. All these things are the errors of 
men who believed what they saw. They saw the 
earth as flat and they believed it to be so. They 
saw that, as they looked out upon the ocean, it 
seemed to come to an end and so they believed 
that if one should sail his ship far enough it would 
tumble off into space. Their minds were not dis- 
abused until men came who believed what they 
could not see. Life 1s spent in separating the seem- 
ing from the real. When we have come to the 
time when we believe ourselves to know some- 
thing of the realities of life, we are ready to 
admit that the most obvious thing is often the least 
true, and the most illusive one the most closely 
related to reality. 

We sometimes measure a man’s wisdom by the 
number of things in which he has ceased to believe. 
To the pessimist, life is a succession of bitter dis- 
appointments. This disillusioned man conceives 
his fellow men as striving for the unattainable, 
like children trying to catch sunbeams. ‘To him, 
life is a bitter hoax; it leads us on, toiling and 
hoping, with occasional distant visions of. still 
waters and green pastures; and leaves us at last, 
weary and athirst, amidst desert sands. ‘Hope 
deferred maketh the heart sick.’ In every life, 
however successful it may be in the end, there are 
these times of the deferring of hope, when coming 
to the place where we felt sure there would be rest 
and reward, we seem to be as far from it as we 


114 


THE VINDICATION OF ILLUSION 


were at the beginning of our journey. ‘The hap- 
piness, as well as the moral value, of our lives will 
depend on whether we keep on in the struggle to 
come to our destination, even though we be sick 
at heart with successive disappointments. He who 
sits down amidst the burning sands, refusing to go 
on because of his disappointment, will never come 
to that place where the visionary 1s, at last, trans- 
muted into the actual. 

It is the promise of faith that the illusion shall 
be the reality. ‘“IThe mirage shall become a pool.” 
‘The wilderness and the solitary place shall be 
glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice and 
blossom as the rose; from the wilderness shall 
waters break out and streams in the desert.”’ Faith 
is the trusting of what doubt declares to be a vain 
illusion. It leads us on in the journey of life 
through many a weary experience and many a fail- 
ure to attain, ever toward the lovely view that, 
in moments of rare vision, we have seen before 
us. The green pastures and the still waters may 
not be visible to us now; but we know that we did 
see them and we believe that, however many may 
be our disappointments, if we march on bravely, 
we shall at last come to where they are. The 
shadow of a high rock in a weary land is some- 
where ahead. Sometime we shall rest there and 
be satisfied. No glittering promises of less lovely 
things shall tempt us from our path. Our quest 


As 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


is for the shining river and we know that we shall 
come to it. 

We may consider how this promise is fulfilled in 
some of the relations of ordinary life. Here, 
coming from the door of the church, amid the 
laughter and congratulations of their friends, are 
a bride and bridegroom. From their present point 
of view they see married life as a bright and beau- 
tiful oasis amid the drab commonplaces of the 
world. Hand in hand they have made their way 
toward it and now they are almost there. Shall 
they realize the bright vision which now fills them 
with delight? Is married life to be for them what 
they think it is to be? Probably not. In six 
months, or a year, or two, or five, they will dis- 
cover that many of the visions that seemed so en- 
ticing have no reality. They will discover that, 
even with love to enrich and strengthen them, life 
is yet a journey through the wilderness. Whether 
they will continue to go hand in hand with mutual 
trust and courage until at last they come to the 
reality which they did not see in the beginning will 
depend upon their strength of purpose and the 
genuineness of the love which binds them one to 
the other. The sparkling waters are before them 
if only they will continue to believe it. Let them 
not bind their eyes and refuse to look further. 
The symbol fades away amid the workaday neces- 
sities of married life; but the substance shall yet 


116 


THE VINDICATION OF ILLUSION 


be theirs if, patiently and with courage, they will 
continue to go forward. 

Or here is another procession coming from the 
church, with no laughter, but with tears. A be- 
loved life has come to its earthly close. A wife 
and children are left without him who was their 
protector and their strength; or a father and 
mother are left to mourn their first born. Where 
now are all those dreams of the future, on which 
they founded their expectations of being happy? 
How our lives clatter in a heap around us when 
death comes and takes from us the one person 
whose continued presence with us made living de- 
sirable and significant! But at the edge of the 
grave, faith speaks. “The mirage shall become a 
pool.” That perfect unity of life with life, now 
deferred in the commonplace of death, shall at last 
be realized in a realm beyond the range of fleshly 
vision, yet to the view of faith but a little distance 
farther on. “Thou canst not follow me now, but 
thou shalt follow me afterwards.” “In my 
Father’s house are many mansions. I go to pre- 
pare a place for you, that where I am ye may be 
also; if it were not so I would have told you.” So 
faith strengthens hope and we journey on in spite 
of present disappointments, knowing that the suf- 
ferings of this present illusory hour are not to be 
compared to the glories which await us in the real- 
ity beyond. 

That blessed reality is sometimes brought close 

117 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


to us by men and women who have found it for 
themselves. There are those who are so clear- 
eyed in their vision and so courageous in their 
faith, that their very presence seems to turn the 
desert into a refreshing pool. ‘‘Blessed,’’ says the 
Psalmist, ‘‘are they who, passing through the val- 
ley of hot sand, make it a well.’ These are the 
folk who carry with them the atmosphere of the 
oasis and who come into our lives like a refresh- 
ing breeze. It is of such as these that Paul spoke 
when he said, concerning one of his friends, “He 
hath oft refreshed me.’”’ Many a worn traveler 
has found a well of water springing up into ever- 
lasting life, through the opening of his eyes by one 
who has passed through sore affliction and has 
learned to find beauty in the place of ashes and 
the oil of joy amidst the spirit of mourning. 

It is the trust of the religious soul that, in the 
disappearance of the symbol, the reality for which 
it stands shall become clear to us. After all, the 
ships that I saw in the sky were real ships, but 
they were not in the sky; and the most beautiful 
illusions of the desert are reflections of actual pools 
and palm trees, miles away. ‘The hopes of men 
relate to realities, but we often see them at a faulty 
angle. Emerson, in his essay on Love, speaks of 
this. ‘In looking backward,” he says, of lovers 
grown old, “they may find that several things 
which were not the charm, have more reality to 
this groping memory than the charm itself which 

118 


THE VINDICATION OF ILLUSION 


embalmed them.” It is not you but the radiance 
of you that is beloved. ‘The soul which is in the 
soul of each, craving for a perfect beatitude, de- 
tects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in 
the behaviour of the other. Hence arises surprise, 
expostulation and pain. Yet that which drew them 
to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of vir- 
tue; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed. 
They appear and reappear and continue to attract; 
but the regard changes, quits the sign, and attaches 
to the substance. . . . At last they discover that 
all which at first drew them together,—those once 
sacred features, that magical display of charms— 
was deciduous, had a prospective end like the 
scaffolding by which the house was built; and the 
purification of the intellect and the heart, from 
year to year, is the real marriage foreseen and 
prepared from the first and wholly above their 
consciousness. . . . Ihe soul may be trusted to 
the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive 
as these relations, must be succeeded and sup- 
planted only by what is more beautiful, and so on 
forever.” This is true of all our hopes. We miss 
the shadow, but if we have faith, we shall at last 
attach ourselves to the substance. If the path of 
our life seems to be through hot sands, remember 
that they who stood by the still waters in the Seer’s 
vision were they who had come out of great tribu- 
lation. 

Is your life embittered in disappointment? 


11g 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


Then look back and see if you have not lost brass 
and gained gold. “For brass I will bring gold, 
for iron I will bring silver, for wood, brass and 
for stones, iron.’ As the symbols of what we 
think we want fade from our vision, we need only 
courage and perseverance, toiling a little longer 
toward the mark of our high calling, to have re- 
vealed to us the reality for which they stood. If 
we are cast down in contemplation of the illusions 
that are so common in life, let us reflect on how 
often they have been displaced by yet more beau- 
tiful reality. “I saw no temple therein,” says the 
Seer, and one might suppose that for such a man 
to see through the heavenly portals and find no 
temple would be a grievous disappointment; but 
there was something better. “I saw no temple 
therein for the Lamb and the Lord God Almighty 
are the temple of it.” If there is heaviness and 
perplexity in our lives, let us be patient. “The sym- 
bol shall become the reality and the reality shall 
be infinitely more lovely than the symbol. ‘For 
now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face 
to face.’ ‘The mirage shall become a pool.” 


120 


THE BENEVOLENT CONSPIRACY 


In the eighth chapter of Paul’s letter to the 
Romans the Apostle makes a surprising statement. 
In previous chapters he has been picturing the 
painful struggle of a soul to find salvation from 
itself. “There is a law of the flesh warring against 
the law of the spirit. He has no peace because he 
is in conflict with himself. In the agony of this 
inner struggle he cries out, ‘“Wretched man that I 
am, who shall deliver me?” When he looks out 
from this inner warfare, it seems that the whole 
universe undergoes the same incessant conflict— 
“The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in 
pain.” And then, in the midst of his despair, he 
finds a “Law of Life.” Let a man but turn his 
life definitely toward the Spirit and all things shall 
conspire for his welfare. ‘“‘We know,” he says, 
“that all things work together for good, to them 
that love God.” 

In the end of the passage he challenges the 
forces of evil to do harm to the spiritually minded 
soul. “In all these things we are more than con- 
querers. Neither death nor life, angels nor prin- 
cipalities, powers of present or future, powers of 
height, or depth, nor anything else in all creation 

121 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


shall be able to separate us from God’s love in 
Christ Jesus our Lord.” 

The Apostle is not indulging in mere rhetorical 
flights. He makes these statements definitely and 
confidently, as a chemist might set down a for- 
mula. He says these things because he knows that 
they are true and his knowledge is based on his 
own experience. In spite of the fact that his life 
has been full of tribulation and suffering, tortured 
with what he calls a “thorn in the flesh,” perse- 
cuted by enemies and not always served by friends, 
he is a man of joy and contentment. He had 
proved by experience the truth of the principle 
he lays down—that to those who love God all 
things work together for good. 

The principle of his teaching rests on his idea 
that the flesh and all that pertains to it is destruc- 
tive and that life is to be attained only in the spirit. 
To be carnally minded, he says, is death. To be 
spiritually minded is life and peace. And to those 
who are spiritually minded there is an inner power 
which is aseptic to all evil. In some of his letters 
he speaks of the “power that worketh in us.” He 
says that there are various processes but that it is 
the same God that directs these processes and that 
the individual need only work with the power that 
seeks to work in him to achieve strength and peace. 
In other words, we are not all saved in the same 
way but we are all saved by the same God and, 
fundamentally, we are all saved on the same prin- 

522 


THE BENEVOLENT CONSPIRACY 


ciple, namely, the joining of our own will with 
the will of the Divine. When a true concord of 
purpose is established between ourselves and God, 
then we are proof against the slings and arrows 
of the world. 

It is the teaching of both Old and New Testa- 
ments as well as the faith of Christians of all 
periods and all churches, that the spirit of God 
dwells within the life of the individual, strength- 
ening, protecting and comforting. We love such 
figurative promises as that “the arrow that flieth 
by day and the pestilence that walketh in the night 
shall not come nigh thee,” that God shall beset his 
loyal servant behind and before, bearing him up 
lest he bruise his feet against the stones, leading 
him through the perilous valley like a shepherd 
and guiding him through deep waters so that he 
shall not be overwhelmed. The promise to 
Joshua, “Be strong and of good courage and no 
enemy shall stand against thee,’ is repeated in a 
hundred different figures in the pages of the Bible. 
So among these great disciples of Jesus, there was 
no quavering, fearful spirit. They lived no easy 
life; they suffered terrible trials; nor were they 
immune from the commoner forms of tribulation. 
As the great tragedies of life overtook them, so 
also did the thousand pin pricks of ordinary exist- 
ence irritate and worry them. Yet there is about 
them an atmosphere of tranquillity and peace ap- 
parent to the most careless reader of their works. 

123 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


They faced all the perils of adventurous life and 
underwent all the small miseries that flesh is heir 
to, yet they cultivated in themselves the conscious- 
ness of their oneness with God and they lived 
tranquil and contented as well as tremendously 
effective lives. 

The Christian who is not living a full, grateful, 
happy, strong life has missed something essential 
in his faith. Melancholy is no part of religion. 
If we are not cheerful, we are not truly understand- 
ing Him, whose habit it was to greet his friends 
with the words, “Be of good cheer.” If we are 
gloomy, we are not living the life pictured in the 
Gospels and enjoyed by millions of those who have 
found the true Way. Paul recalls to his readers 
the memory of their unhappy past, “When we were 
unspiritual,’”’ he says, “sinful cravings were active 
in us which made us fruitful unto death, but now 
we have abandoned that which once held us and 
can live in a new way, not under a code as of old, 
but according to the spirit.” The spiritual man, 
says Paul, lives under a new principle. Whereas 
the power that once controlled him was the power 
of death, that which now controls him is the power 
of life, so that though he may seem, outwardly, to 
fall into decay, yet he is inwardly renewed day by 
day. 

Whenever we feel ourselves to be afflicted in 
any way; whenever things go wrong; whenever 
misfortune meets us, we do well to meditate and 


124 


THE BENEVOLENT CONSPIRACY 


build up in our consciousness the fact that the in- 
dwelling spirit of God is a living power against 
all evil. I say whenever we are afflicted. I mean 
literally whenever. In the most trifling concerns, 
when we are disturbed by mere irritations, annoy- 
ances and small disappointments, it is well to have 
this great spiritual truth alive in our thought. No 
Christian should ever be annoyed. There are 
times when it is our duty to be angry, but the pettt- 
ness of what we call an annoyance should never 
disturb the tranquillity of any man who has learned 
how to live. It is by learning to live calmly amid 
the small troubles of every day that we prepare 
ourselves for the real trials which are sure to come. 
It is when we have taught ourselves to live in 
peace amid the many trifling ills that fill our com- 
mon days that we shall be made ready to face suc- 
cessfully the great tragedies of life. What we 
need is that practice of the presence of God recom- 
mended by the saintly Brother Lawrence who, 
amid the irritations of his work as kitchen scul- 
lion in a monastery, found the secret of a happy 
life. 

One of the most popular of American diseases 
is called by the name of “neurasthenia,” a name 
euphonious enough to be given to a flower or a 
pretty girl. But there is nothing euphonic in the 
thing itself. It means the jangling of frayed-out 
nerves, the discord of a life worried into useless- 
ness by trifles before it is half lived, rendered unfit 

125 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


to meet the duties and enjoy the pleasures of ad- 
vancing years. Sometimes a string in a piano will 
break and in response to all the other notes it will 
rattle and jangle, to the distress of the least sen- 
sitive of ears. So it is with what we call our 
nerves. ‘The over-tension of some part of our 
natures causes breakage and frayed ends. Every 
untoward circumstance impinges and jangles in this 
discordant area of ourselves with distressing re- 
sults to ourselves and to our neighbors. Most of 
this sort of life wreckage could be avoided if only 
men and women would learn to abide in the realms 
of peace. When we find things going a bit wrong, 
we are tempted to think too much of the perils and 
mischances of life. To the person in this state of 
mind the world is full of the forces of disaster. 
We forget that the world is veritably alive with 
ministrants of healing and cure. “Sin abounds 
but grace much more abounds.” If it were not 
so the human race would have become extinct long 
simce. 

There is here a cure for the haunting anxiety 
which destroys so many lives. We should keep 
ourselves reminded of the obvious fact that dis- 
aster cannot be the rule and safety the exception, 
else the world would not have continued to exist. 
Fears are usually groundless. Optimism is war- 
ranted by the fact that, after countless generations 
of human experience, we are here, still carrying 
on the enterprises of humanity. Somewhere, amid 

126 


THE BENEVOLENT CONSPIRACY 


all the troublous elements, there is a power of 
healing and saving by which we are enabled to 
make our way through the years. If we could 
eliminate fear and anxiety from our lives we 
should save ourselves a great part of the wear and 
tear that makes us old too soon. We all know 
that worry is the mood of unfaith. The secret of 
Paul’s continuing joy is to be read in his conduct 
when the little ship on which he was a passenger 
was being tossed about in the storm, in instant 
peril of engulfment. He slept calmly through the 
night and when morning came he called to his 
frightened companions, “Cheer up. I know it 
will be as God told me.” There are times in 
every life when the decks slant alarmingly; but, 
somehow, the little ship rides on. 

But what of those times when great trouble is 
upon us? Surely then the soul that has learned 
the essential and inclusive friendliness of life will 
come into the high rewards of faith. Nothing is 
more beautiful than the way in which some people 
bear affliction. It is not a stoical defiance, nor is 
it a pliant resignation that they manifest. It is a 
sublime courage, born of faith, that all things 
work together for good to them that love God. 
Have you ever noticed how the powers of nature 
work together in the body when there is a wound? 
You may have been whittling a stick and care- 
lessly let the knife slip, cutting a deep gash in 
your hand. Instantly all the forces in your body 


¥27 


CHARACTER (ANID SEPA PEE TING 


send their potent help to the endangered spot and 
a wondrous building up begins, the weaving of 
new tissues, the expulsion of bad matter, the filling 
in and renewing of the living flesh. It may be 
accompanied with pain, but you know the process 
is under way and you are satisfied. What marvels 
have occurred on the battlefield, when men torn 
and shattered almost beyond recognition have been 
restored by the inner forces of their lives, helped 
by the intelligence of those who know that these 
forces are there and who are skilled in promoting 
the conditions in which they work best. 

Have you not felt, likewise, that one of God’s 
merciful ministries is in the healing of grief? 
Sometimes when we have passed through tribula- 
tion life seems to wrap us round again with the 
arms of motherhood. There is healing in the very 
sunlight, in the glistening white of a snowy field, 
or the soft breeze of a day in June. Then friend- 
ship comes to us with its sympathy and trust and 
the whole circle of life is so vocal with assurances 
of tenderness and love that in spite of our grief 
we smile again. These are the things that the 
apostle saw in the midst of his afflicted days. He 
knew hardship, disappointment, injustice, persecu- 
tion and pain, and yet, as he meditated upon his 
own experiences, he saw that all things worked 
together for his good. 

Upon this inner divine power we should be de- 
pending all the time. An ancient book of travel 

128 


THE BENEVOLENT CONSPIRACY 


tells of one who prayed during a storm at sea, ““O 
Lord, I am no common beggar, for I do not 
trouble thee every day, for I have never prayed 
to thee before, and if it pleases thee to save me I 
will never pray to thee again as long as I live.” 
This is not at all an unusual attitude, though few 
of us express ourselves with equal frankness. It 
is the practice of the presence of God we want, not 
merely an occasional flight for refuge in Him. It 
is a state of mind that we need, the habitual de- 
pendence on the underlying friendliness of life that 
will give us happiness and peace. 

One may ask how all this may bear on the vari- 
ous cults of mental healing, autosuggestion and 
other like philosophies which have proved so at- 
tractive to minds of a certain type. That many 
people are helped by these systems of suggestion 
cannot be denied and one is inclined to be thank- 
ful that certain kinds of misery can be alleviated 
on any terms. But most of these doctrines are 
mere spiritual opiates; they can help us only if we 
are willing to dull the edge of our minds. Most 
of us would prefer to keep our sensibilities keen, 
even though some suffering must be thereby en- 
dured, to doping our intellects with any system of 
thought that involves the perversion of the natural 
processes of cognition. These men of the New 
Testament saw the sorrow of the world. ‘They 
neither denied its existence nor did they shrink 
from enduring even more than their just share of 

129 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


it. We may achieve a meretricious sort of hap- 
piness by closing our eyes to the unlovely. We can 
comfort ourselves by persuading the wounded 
man by the wayside that he is entirely comfortable. 
We can refuse to contemplate the misery that is 
all about us. But this is not the way of the Apos- 
tles. It does not answer the problem of life any 
more than the false sunlight of a scene at the the- 
atre will cause the grass-mats on the floor of the 
stage to grow. 

Plato said that the goal of education, as of re- 
ligion, was the attainment of a blessed vision, a 
state of insight into things as they are. We must 
not deceive ourselves as to a single jot or tittle to 
gain peace. We must look at life and at all of 
life. What we need is to see in every tragedy, not 
only its outer dress of sorrow, but also its inner 
meaning of blessedness; or, if we cannot see it all, 
to see enough to make us sure that itis there. All 
things work together for good to men and women 
who have attained the insight whereby we may 
see in life the abiding presence of the divine spirit. 
The trouble with most of the religions of placidity 
is that they are loaded with doctrines which in- 
volve the perversion of our mental processes and 
which are not at all necessary to their effectiveness 
within the range they have set for themselves. 

When we abide continually in the eternal pres- 
ence we learn to recognize the universal powers 
of God in every common thing. Even as the artist 

130 


THE BENEVOLENT CONSPIRACY 


studies the landscape until he has attained the in- 
sight that enables him to see colors and discern 
forms invisible to the careless and untrained ob- 
server, so the soul that abides in God shall behold 
the evidences of his presence in the rocks that im- 
peril the channel, in the waves that crash about 
the little ship and in the clouds that obscure the 
sun. They will learn that these things are better 
for the building of our skill and fortitude than the 
motionless seas and cloudless skies amidst which 
we should be safe but stagnant. Such men and 
women shall not ask for an easy life but for insight 
and courage whereby they may deal manfully with 
the hardships in which manhood is made. We 
need a faith that shall comprehend all that we are 
and all that we do and all that is done tous. We 
cannot immolate ourselves and live in a vacuum. 
We must not refuse to look honestly at all the 
facts of life. But we can know that in ourselves 
there is a saving power that mingles all the ele- 
ments of our lives into good, even as there is a 
power in the plant which takes all the unlikely ele- 
ments of soil and air, of falling torrent and de- 
caying refuse and fuses them, by the miracle of 
nature, into the beauty and fragrance of the 
flower. It is thus that, in the God-conscious life, 
all things work together for good. 


131 


THE CONSECRATION OF DEFEAT 


KinGc Davip dreamed of doing a beautiful 
thing. He planned to build a house unto his God. 
He never carried out his plan. A day came when 
it was made known to him, finally and irrevocably, 
that the dream of his life could never be fulfilled; 
but with the message came this consoling word, 
“Thou didst well in that it was in thine heart; not- 
withstanding thou shalt not build the house.” 

We were talking of a man who, at eighty-five, 
fulfilled the purpose he had conceived at forty. It 
would be folly, however, to assert that all men who 
conceive purposes succeed in fulfilling them, how- 
ever hard they try. Many an earnest soul has 
striven faithfully, only to suffer final defeat. Here, 
for instance, is David, the hero of Hebrew his- 
tory. To him are ascribed the highest gifts. He 
is a warrior, a statesman and a poet. His reign 
is celebrated as the beginning of all that is glori- 
ous in his nation’s history. Surely no man’s life 
could more fully exemplify what the world calls 
success than did the career of David. In his life- 
time he had wealth, genius, place and power, and 
in his death he had immortal fame. 

Yet there was one thing lacking; his success was 


132 


THE CONSECRATION OF DEFEAT 


not complete, for he failed to carry out the most 
cherished of his purposes. Through all his man- 
hood he had dreamed of building this temple to 
Jehovah. One may imagine him in the quiet hours 
of the twilight, during his warlike career, with 
the clash of arms stilled for the time and the night 
coming down on the tents of his weary army, sit- 
ting under the royal canopy, weaving the fabric 
of his dream, the dented arms of a soldier by his 
side and the vision of a prophet in his heart. “The 
Lord is my rock, my fortress, my deliverer, my 
strength and my high tower; let the God of my 
salvation be exalted.” These are the thoughts that 
filled his mind and in them was born his holy am- 
bition to give them expression in enduring stone. 
As the years passed the building must have taken 
definite form in his imagination. He consulted 
architects, searched the Law, drew rough plans on 
the sand with the point of his weapon and consulted 
with the more learned of the priests. “The most 
delightful hours of his day, with the work of his 
sovereign duty done, would be those in which he 
dreamed and planned this monument of pious 
gratitude. But it was not to be. He went to his 
death with the ambition of his life unrealized. 
Other things he had been permitted to do. ‘This 
supreme thing was reserved for other hands than 
his. 

It reminds us of the failure of the life of Moses 

133 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


to quite complete itself. He had led the people 
of Israel out of bondage. After years of labor, 
he had brought them out of their distresses. Then, 
when the land flowing with milk and honey was 
almost under foot, he realized that he should 
never see it save from his post on far distant moun- 
tain-tops. So, in his old age, he looked out into 
the distances where lay the fulfillment of his pur- 
pose. Somewhere out there the nation would 
come to rest; but, for him, life must end here in 
the misty distance. ‘“This is the land. Thou shalt 
see it with thine eyes; but thou shalt not go over 
thither,’ was the word that came to him. Thus 
it was with David. ‘Throughout a long life of 
war and statecraft, which lifted him from the 
humble home of his father to the throne of the 
nation, his great dream was of the day when he 
should build the temple of Jehovah. But it was 
not to be. 

There are some fortunate men who see the full 
fruition of their hopes. Simeon, serving in the 
temple until old age, at last sees the fulfillment of 
his desire and is satisfied. ‘‘Now Lord,” he says, 
“lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine 
eyes have seen thy salvation.” But with most of 
us it is not so. Henry Thomas Buckle, trained to 
scholarship from babyhood, conceiving in early 
manhood his plan of making a history of civiliza- 
tion, spending the best part of his life in prepara- 


134 


THE CONSECRATION OF DEFEAT 


tion, at last is able to finish no more than the 
introduction, and cries out on his deathbed, “My 
book, my book, I shall never finish my book.”’ 
How many disappointed souls there are whose 
last chapters must go unwritten! 

Wordsworth believed that the happy man was 
the man who in his maturity was permitted to 
realize the visions of his youth: 


“Who is the happy warrior? Who is he 
That every man in arms should wish to be? 
It is the generous spirit, who, when brought 
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought, 
Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought.” 


It is a great blessing to be able thus to bring to 
material existence a cherished dream. Herbert 
Spencer came Very close to doing it in his Synthetic 
Philosophy. In the introduction to his Principles 
of Sociology he says, “In looking back over the 
six-and-thirty years which have passed since the 
Synthetic Philosophy was commenced, I am sur- 
prised at my audacity in undertaking it and still 
more surprised by its completion. In 1860 my 
small resource had been nearly all frittered away 
in writing and publishing books which did not pay 
their expenses; and I was suffering under a chronic 
disorder, caused by overtax of brain, which, 
wholly disabling me for eighteen months, there- 
after limited my work to three hours a day, and 
usually less. . . . Sometimes a forlorn hope is 


135 


CHARACTER AND) HAPPINESS 


justified by the event. ‘Though, along with other 
deterrents, many relapses, now lasting for weeks, 
now for months and once for years, often made me 
despair of reaching the end, yet at length the end 
is reached. . . . Still there is satisfaction in the 
consciousness that losses, discouragements, and 
shattered health have not prevented me from ful- 
filling the purpose of my life.”” Yet even Spencer 
did not quite finish his task, nor did he, with all 
the labor of those six and thirty years, discover a 
unified principle of life sufficient to account for its 
deepest and most constant problems. He died, a 
depressed and disappointed man, having failed, 
with all his researches, to find that which could 
give him comfort as he neared the end. Contem- 
plating his work of a lifetime, he said, as he laid 
it down, “My chief pleasure is in my emancipa- 
tion.” 

Gibbon did it. In spite of an unfortunate love 
affair in youth and many other disappointments, 
he did accomplish the one great thing he dreamed 
of doing. “It was at Rome,” he says, ‘fon the 
15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the 
ruins of the capital while the barefoot monks were 
singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the 
idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first 
started to my mind.” Dr. Johnson did it. Un- 
dertaking, single-handed, a task that might well 
have daunted the confident resolution of a dozen 

136 


THE CONSECRATION OF DEFEAT 


men, unsupported by the favor of the great and 
forsaken by some of those from whom he had ex- 
pected assistance, he labored on until Johnson’s 
Dictionary of the English Language became an 
imperishable fact in the history of literature. 
Such happiness as Johnson enjoyed was rooted in 
this superb accomplishment. So some men suc- 
ceed, as Caleb did, but many of us do not live to 
see our lives complete themselves. We may have 
the desire, the intention and the ability to do a 
great work and yet fail to bring it to pass. Like 
Moses, some of us must be content to stop and 
look at the promised land from afar. When we 
are in sight of our goal, the barrier is thrown 
across our path. When our drama is ready to 
complete itself, the curtain falls, untimely, and we 
cannot stay to see the end. 

It is as if you planted seeds in your garden and 
they germinated and pushed through the soil, 
building stem and leaves and buds as the warm 
days called forth the beauties of all nature to new 
life. Now suppose the plant to have conscious- 
ness and to be aware that the consummation of its 
existence is a crimson flower. Suppose it tries to 
bloom, feeling within itself a yearning necessity to 
express its inner life in color and fragrance; but 
the bloom never comes; frost falls with the plant 
still striving and still failing. Many a life’s ful- 
filment is frustrated in Just such a way. Shakes- 
pere thought through all this three hundred years 


137 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


ago when, in his contribution to the play of King 
Henry VIII, he made the fallen Wolsey say, 


“This is the state of man; today he puts forth 
The tender leaves of hopes; tomorrow blossoms, 
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him; 
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, 
And, when he thinks, good easy man, full surely 
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root, 

And then he falls, as I do.” 


Now this is constantly happening and it is hard 
for us to understand it; yet we must understand it 
or life becomes a torturing disappointment for 
multitudes of earnest souls. And to one who has 
the depressing conviction that his great life pur- 
pose can never be fulfilled, that his root is nipped 
before his life has borne its fruit, there may well 
come this message that was given to King David 
when he was made to see that his dream could 
never be made real. “Thou didst well in that it 
was in thine heart.’ David was busy with war 
and statecraft, busy with things less romantic and 
ideal than the building of temples, but more neces- 
sary at that particular period in the history of his 
nation. His military services to his generation 
had unfitted him for things he wanted most to do. 
Yet through it all the purpose was there, and it 
was by that cherished purpose that he was to be 
judged. Because he had carried it in his heart, he 
had done well. 

138 


THE CONSECRATION OF DEFEAT 


Many of us know what we would,do, we know 
what we could do; but we are preoccupied with 
necessitous duties that bind us as with chains. 
Every time you say with a sigh, ‘““Ah, how I wish 
I had my life to live over again,” you express the 
same regret that filled the thoughts of the ancient 
Hebrew King. The common daily duties have de- 
feated you. ‘He who hath a wife and children,” 
says Bacon, “hath given hostages to fortune.” We 
cannot write our great poem because the children 
must be given a home, an education and a start in 
the world; we know that the coalman and 
the iceman and the washerwoman will be around 
promptly with the monthly bill and we must spend 
the month earning wherewith to pay; and so we 
come at last to the realization that the time is past 
and we can never carry out our fine plans for set- 
ting the Thames on fire. 

Leslie Stephen, the biographer and critic, once 
wrote to the younger Oliver Wendell Holmes 
concerning this problem of middle-age. ‘What 
ought a man to make of life? Ought I to live on 
bread and water and write a magnum opus. . 
or ought I to have an occasional glass of cham- 
pagne and write nothing but leading articles? I 
puzzle over this often and can’t make it out. The 
bread and water plan comes rather hard on one’s 
wife, yet the other is unsatisfactory.’ I suppose 
it was not the responsibility for the welfare of a 


139 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


wife, nor yet the price of champagne, that kept 
David from fulfilling his dream; but it was the 
same sort of frustrating deterrent. Practical 
duties had preémpted him. He must go on and 
do the things that fell to his hand. They were 
the things that most imperatively needed to be 
done, at the time, things that he, of all men, could 
most fittingly and efficiently do. Just so are you 
and I when we feel in us a power that can never 
express itself because we must go on day after 
day and year after year in the routine grind of 
getting a living. If we keep our vision with us, 
however unlikely its fulfilment, and if we continue 
to do what we can do and must do, manfully, faith- 
fully, and well, we may deserve such words of ap- 
preciation as are found concerning David in the 
Book of Acts. “For after he had served his own 
generation by the will of God, he fell on sleep and 
was laid unto his fathers.”” Though we build no 
temples we shall do well, in that the higher service 
was cherished in our hearts. 

There is a verse in Revelation that has courage 
in it for those who have done their best and have 
been disappointed in the outcome. ‘‘Blessed are 
the dead that die in the Lord from henceforth; 
yea, saith the spirit, that they may rest from their 
labors and their works do follow them.” They 
rest but their works go on. David had done what 
he could to serve his time and he went to his fath- 

140 


THE CONSECRATION OF DEFEAT 


ers. But yet his work was not done; his life had 
not expended itself when the grave opened. There 
was still power enough in his purpose to carry on, 
after he was gone, the project he had dreamed. 
The temple, after all, was built. His hands did 
not build it, nor did he live to see it; and yet, with- 
out this purpose which had given direction to his 
life and which, through his life, had prepared his 
son and the nation for the task, we may well doubt 
if it ever had been built, at least until some other 
had cherished the dream of it until he wove it into 
the hopes of his generation. 

No man knows how his life’s essential meaning 
may realize itself long after he has seemed de- 
feated and beaten down. We speak of the won- 
ders of modern invention; but what discovery of 
modern times compares with the discovery of that 
unknown student who lived thousands of years ago 
and who worked out a formula for making a metal 
of strength and texture suitable for tools, from 
an amalgam of copper and tin? If the Bronze 
Age was the beginning of what we call civilization 
it was because this man of the unrecorded past 
lived and worked, and if the earth today is 
girdled by steel rails on which run the swift mes- 
sengers of commerce, it is only because men have 
added to the first discovery of this uncelebrated 
genius. If Langley and Lilienthal had not given 
their lives to the pursuing of an unrealized pur- 
pose to solve the problem of the flying machine 


I4I 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


and if James Means had not dreamed of the mas- 
tery of the air while engaged in the prosaic task 
of manufacturing three-dollar shoes, the Wrights 
would not have picked up the copy of Mr. Means’ 
little aeronautic magazine from which they re- 
ceived their first inspiration. In countless in- 
stances the dream of one life has been realized in 
the achievements of another, as the dream of 
David was realized in the day when his son stood 
in the courts of the gorgeous new-built temple and 
uttered his immortal words of dedication. In such 
cases we see how the words of Revelation are ful- 
filled, ‘“They shall rest from their labors and nee 
works do follow them.” 

“Tn that it was in thine heart.”” That was the 
thing that interested Jesus when he was dealing 
with men and women. What was in their hearts? 
Is this man, Matthew, a publican, a renegade Jew, 
despised of the respectable? No matter. Let us 
read the deeper aspiration that is hidden in his 
heart. Is this woman a prostitute, outcast, aban- 
doned? Nomatter. Read what is written in her 
heart. Are you the respectable head of a respect- 
able family with a position in respectable society? 
No matter, says Jesus, look upon your heart and 
read what is written there. What is the deep- 
down purpose in your life? That is the measure 
of your standing in the sight of God. 

And here we come to the very heart of the re- 
ligious life. You may be inclined to be sceptical 

142 


THE CONSECRATION OF DEFEAT 


as we preachers outline to you our pet systems of 
theology. You are not more skeptical of our sys- 
tems than we are of one another’s. Yet all of us 
together believe in God, in worship and in prayer. 
Now here is one central reason why we seek com- 
munion with the Divine. Man cannot read our 
lives; man judges us by what we succeed in doing, 
not by what we long todo. Man values us by the 
things we accomplish, not by the things to which 
we aspire. So we come to this place of worship 
and offer ourselves in communion with Him who 
knows us better. We do our work, bear our bur- 
dens, and endure our disappointments because we 
believe that He knows and cares about these secret 
selves that no man ever sees. Circumstances may 
imprison us; a multitude of trifles may use our 
time and strength; we are so compassed about with 
obligations that the great dreams of our lives re- 
main but dreams; nevertheless we remember the 
words of Him who called us to Himself. It may 
have been but a cup of cold water that we were 
able to offer when we longed to break the precious 
box of alabaster at His feet; but in appraising our 
lives he looks not at what we have done, but at 
what it was our purpose to do. “Inasmuch as ye 
have done it unto one of the least of these, my 
brethren,” he says, “‘ye have done it unto me.”’ 

So, however far short we find ourselves of ful- 
filling the dreams of youth, we still cling to them. 
Perhaps, in the providence of God, we shall yet 


143 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


bring them to pass. If we do not, we remember 
the words of God unto King David, “Thou shalt 
not build the house, nevertheless thou didst well in 
that it was in thine heart.” 


144 


INTEGRATING THE INDIVIDUAL 


IT is interesting to note how modern psychology 
is discovering some of the truths set forth in the 
New Testament a score of centuries ago. A re- 
cent writer gives us a definite technique for happi- 
ness and effectiveness. It begins with and de- 
pends on what he calls ‘“The Freudian Wish.” We 
are to conceive a wish, a desire, which shall be so 
inclusive as to bring into subjection to itself all the 
other desires of our lives. We are to find such a 
mode of instigating and satisfying desire that when 
we satisfy one wish, all others will tend to be satis- 
fied at the same time. We may illustrate the mat- 
ter simply by supposing that a small boy wants 
candy. He puts on his hat, walks several blocks, 
offers his money to the shopkeeper, puts it out of 
his power to buy a baseball—perhaps a dozen dis- 
tinct acts and renunciations are included in this 
purchase which is instigated by a desire inclusive 
enough and powerful enough to dominate his life 
for the moment. Or we may suppose him, later 
on in life, to want a college education. If his wish 
is strong enough to dominate, everything he does 
will relate itself to it. His work, his play, his 
money and all else that pertains to him will link 
itself with his great purpose to obtain an educa- 


145 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


tion. On the other hand, if he wants an education ~ 
and also wants to be the champion of the corner 
poolroom and the swain of some flyaway girl, he 
will live a divided, ineffectual, unhappy life. There- 
fore, says the modern psychology, we must find 
some wish, or purpose, that shall be strong enough 


to bend to its own direction all the other desires © 


of our souls, if we are to be happy. 

All this Paul sets forth in the seventh chapter 
of the Epistle to the Romans. It is not a matter 
of speculative theology, nor of experimental sci- 
ence; it is the experience of a living soul; it is a 
piece of sublime self revelation; it is an echo of 
the human cry for salvation from the inner hell of 
conflicting desires which makes life a torture. The 
suffering which Paul had endured is reflected in 
the passionate eloquence of his words. ““Wretched 
man that I am, who shall deliver me from the 
body of this death?’’ It is the question of the 
nervous wreck, of the man caught in the trap of 
ruinous habit, of the soul that is intolerably bur- 
dened with the sense of sin. Yet this same man, 
in later letters, writes in a strain which reflects a 
self-mastery and inward peace amid outward af- 
flictions which would have overwhelmed an or- 


dinary soul. We may well consider the secret he 


reveals to us. 

To the study of the minister and to the consult- 
ing room of the physician come weary souls who 
seem ready to give up the struggle of life and to 

146 





INTEGRATING THE INDIVIDUAL 


let the forces of evil have their way with them. 
Almost invariably, when people come to this des- 
perate pass, the trouble is within themselves. Men 
face great disasters and seek help in meeting them, 
they come, bowed down with the weight of sor- 
row, weary with grief; but none of these are so 
desperately in need of help as the man or woman 
whose inner life is a continual warfare of self 
against self. They are torn in a conflict between 
two natures and they come with the same cry in 
their hearts that the Apostle uttered, ““Who shall 
deliver me from the body of this death?” 

Paul answers his own question. “I thank my 
God,” he says, “through the Lord Jesus Christ.” 
He goes on to explain that, in Christ, he has found 
a higher law, transcending both the law of the 
flesh and the law of the mind, by which their con- 
flict, one with another, is brought to an end. In 
this higher law, which he calls the “Law of the 
spirit of life in Christ Jesus,’’ he has found peace. 
In other words, he has solved the problems grow- 
ing out of the contradictions of his inner life in 
precisely the way in which the scientist solves the 
seeming contraditions of nature. When one law 
contradicts another the scientist knows that, some- 
where, there must be a higher law through which 
the two are reconciled. The higher, more inclu- 
sive generalization is ever the quest of the man who 
has great problems to solve. The lawyer seeks it 
in preparing his argument. The scientist is de- 

147 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


pendent upon it and there could be no science with- 
out unwavering faith in its existence. We know 
that truth does not contradict itself and that in 
every valid bit of truth we possess there must be 
a determining element that shall link it up with 
every other truth. So, whether our problem be 
one of equity, of chemistry, of theology or of the 
practical management of life, we must govern our- 
selves in accordance with some great inclusive 
principle or hypothesis, which shall give direction 
to all our thought and purpose. 

To Paul, Christ is the central element in the 
scheme of life. He is the personification of the 
intelligence which underlies all creation. ‘He is 
before all things and all things consist in him.” 
When the Apostle turned the powers of his life 
toward Christ and adopted the Christian point- 
of-view, those inner antagonisms, which had kept 
his life torn asunder, ceased, just as the contra- 
dictions of astronomy began to be resolved as 
soon as men agreed that the sun was the center of 
our planetary system. When we take Christ for 
the center of our universe and the chief object of 
our desire, he becomes the perfect fulfillment of 
the ‘‘Freudian Wish,” gathering up into harmoni- 
ous effectiveness all the powers of our lives. 

It is at the point of what scientists call integra- 
tion that the lives of many good people break 
down. In more common terms they want some- 
thing to act as a binder, something to resolve them 

148 


INTEGRATING THE INDIVIDUAL 


into a significant whole, something to assemble 
their separate parts into an effective harmony of 
design and purpose. The words integration, in- 
tegral, integrity keep coming into mind as one 
thinks of this process. Christ is the divine integer 
in human life, the vital, inclusive element, without 
which the problem becomes chaotic and cannot be 
even stated intelligibly. He is the power by which 
life is bound up into unity. He is the hypothesis 
by which human life is made as intelligible, as 
rational and as certain in method as astronomy or 
engineering. Too many are trying to live accord- 
ing to conflicting appetities and purposes contra- 
dictory to one another. Their lives are as ineffec- 
tive and confusing as a textbook on the stars would 
be if written by a man who believed in the Coper- 
nican and the Ptolemaic theories at the same time. 
They are as easily broken down as a bridge would 
be if built by an engineer who sought to justify 
two utterly contradictory theories of construction 
in the one structure. 

Like Aristotle, Bacon and Spencer, Paul had 
the encyclopedic mind. He thinks in terms of the 
universal. Now, as he thinks of his religious ex- 
perience, he sees life in the same relations as 
Spencer saw it when he sought for a principle of 
unity in Nature. Both men saw a more or less 
heterogenous collection of motives, impulses, ap- 
petites and purposes which must somehow be 
bound together in some kind of unity. So Paul 


149 


CHARACTER AN DAH AR EPEN TS 


says regarding Christ, “All things consist in him.” 
Christ is the universal coherent. He is the head 
of creation. “All things hang together in him,” 
is the literal meaning of the Greek text. He is 
the central fact in man’s universe. He Is the heart 
and mind of the social organism and he is the uni- 
fying principal of the individual life. 

We are ineffective and unhappy because our 
lives are too departmental. We allow the unity 
of our selves to be violated. We break up into 
parts. We live a scattered existence, without defi- 
nite meaning or determinate character. Our lives 
are like an Oriental bazaar, full of bric-a-brac, 
over-loaded with expensive junk, having plenty of 
color but no design, with no more character than 
a shop filled with odds and ends of furniture. Of 
course, life is more complex in these days of intri- 
cate civilization than it was in simpler times, and 
yet it must be possible to gather up our complicated 
existence and rule it in accordance with one com- 
prehensive idea. Christianity, says Paul, is that 
idea, and Christ is its source and inspiration. 
Without Him, life tends to become a jumble of 
conflicting desires; with Him, it is a steady prog- 
ress toward the achievement of complete, consist- 
ent manhood. 

We need a religious motive that will not only 
satisfy our emotional nature, but that will enable 
us to live rightly, effectively and happily amid the 
confusing conditions of our everyday existence, 

150 


INTEGRATING THE INDIVIDUAL 


There is a certain type of religion which denies 
that such integrity is necessary. Salvation, ac- 
cording to this faith, is a matter of belief alone. 
The conduct of some persons, who claim to be on 
terms of particular intimacy with the Divine, 
makes it clear that, to them, it does not matter 
how contradictory to the spirit of Christ the acts 
of the saved individual may be. Of course, no 
man wants to put a limit on the saving grace of 
God; yet such a view of salvation does not satisfy 
us. We know that there is something wrong with 
a religious faith which makes a man a bad neigh- 
bor, or which fills him with spiritual conceit, just 
as we know there is something wrong with scien- 
tific theory which fails to justify itself in practical 
experience. We want a religious motive that will 
keep us straight amid the temptations of everyday 
life, that will keep our hearts sympathetic while 
we engage in the shrewd necessities of business; 
that will keep alive in us the vein of poetry, how- 
ever hard-headed we may be; that will quicken our 
imagination so that we can, on occasion, throw off 
the preoccupations of the work-a-day world and 
see the things of God. 

Every man wants many things. That ‘man 
wants but little here below” is a bit of poetical 
nonsense, written by a man in melancholy mood. 
He wants romance and beauty and money and 
power and pleasure and physical satisfaction and 
a score of other things that seem good to him. 


ISI 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


Without these desires he would be less than man; 
yet in the nagging insistence of them he often loses 
both his character and his happiness. He falls, as 
a man would fall who tried to ride four horses 
at once with no controlling rein by which to keep 
them running in a single direction. 

So obvious is this connection between desire and 
disaster that religious teachers have commonly 
taught their disciples to find happiness in the 
habitual suppression of desire. Today psychology 
is telling us that this is a misreading of the facts 
of life and that suppressed desires are che cause 
of a vast amount of human failure. The New 
Testament view is that desire is to be, not sup- 
pressed, but directed. As man has a “will to be- 
lieve,’ so he has a “‘will to want.” In such a solu- 
tion a multitude that man cannot number have 
found the way to peace and power. Here we find 
presented the one great, inclusive, dominating de- 
sire of mankind—a Way unto God. When a man 
goes in that Way he is far from suppressing his 
desires; indeed, his desires are keener than ever, 
his life is more abundant, he is set free from the 
petty inhibitions of the neat-minded moralist. 
Why, then, does he not go to moral smash? For 
the same reason that the circus rider, with four 
horses under him, does not crash into the band- 
stand. His steeds are under a single control, a 
rein strong enough to hold them in the Way. 
Christ is the controlling power of his life. All 

152 


INTEGRATING THE INDIVIDUAL 


the potent wishes of his soul are comprehended 
in his relation to Him. In Christ he has become 
integrally whole. 

A man of integrity is a man whose life interests 
are thus bound together by one great, compelling 
allegiance. Integrity is another word for consist- 
ency. No man is to be trusted, even by himself, 
who is one kind of a man down town, a second 
kind of a man up town, a third kind of a man in 
his home, and yet a fourth kind on the Sabbath 
day in church, according to which one of his de- 
sires has the bit in its teeth. It is interesting to 
note how often that thought of integrity is ex- 
pressed in the Bible. ‘The Psalmists challenge 
the Almighty, ‘Try me and see if there is any 
wicked thing in me.” “Judge me, O God, accord- 
ing to my righteousness and according to the in- 
tegrity that is in me.’ When Job makes his sub- 
lime defense against the charges and insinuations 
of his three counselors, he challenges any man to 
show that his life has not been integrally whole. 
He longs to stand before God Himself, being con- 
fident that the omniscent eye of the Almighty 
would detect in him no inconsistency. It is a 
want of this consciousness of moral integration 
that makes us so weak and vacillating in the con- 
duct of our lives. Our characters are not consist- 
ent; they do not hang together. Our business pur- 
poses do not track with our moral purposes. Our 
religious opinions contradict our economic opin- 


153 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


ions. Wetry to hold too many hypotheses at once. 
Just as men say of a man who has failed in busi- 
ness, that “‘he had too many irons in the fire,” so 
do men fail in the moral or spiritual life, through 
inability to cleave to a single moral and spiritual 
ideal. In Jesus all things are integral. He pro- 
vides a clear and final standard by which we may 
test and eliminate, proving all things and holding 
fast to that which is good. 

There are men and women who shape their 
lives to. their love of pleasure. They are con- 
sistently frivolous. They are forty-year-old chil- 
dren. They have a sort of happiness because they 
live according to one desire, the desire for pleas- 
ure. There are other men who have a sort of 
happiness in other pursuits. They live for busi- 
ness, for politics, or for whatever other interest 
claims their days. A man may get a sort of hap- 
 piness in turning all his desires to the collecting 
of first editions or the raising of guinea pigs. Am- 
bition may become the thing by which life consists, 
and in its fulfillment one finds a kind of satisfac- 
tion. There are men who have yet higher unify- 
ing purposes. ‘Their lives are bound together by 
love of family or by benevolence toward their 
kind. But even the highest of these unifying mo- 
tives is not strong enough to hold life together to 
the end. For the man of pleasure there comes a 
day when, if he does not forsake his sins, his sins 
forsake him, and pleasure ceases to be enjoyable. 


154 


INTEGRATING THE INDIVIDUAL 


The man of business, having sacrificed his time, 
his strength, his opportunities for self-culture, and 
all else to the desire to get money, comes to the 
bitter realization that, having gotten money, there 
is nothing more to be done, and enters into a 
period of work-wracked age, disappointed and 
without hope. Even the man who devotes all of 
himself to his family faces all too soon the inevit- 
able shattering of his idol, for families do not keep 
together. One by one the children whose com- 
panionship and happiness are his only delight, 
make homes for themselves and at last he and his 
life partner are left where they were at the begin- 
ning, save that they have no longer the hopes of 
youth. 

But Jesus Christ, in the words of the Book of 
Revelation, is the same yesterday, today and for- 
ever. He is the one claimant for our devotion 
whom the soul does not outgrow. He reconciles 
all things unto himself, makes all the parts of our 
lives to be consistent one with the other, binds up 
our love, our labor and our delights into one whole; 
in short, he is the spiritual integrant by which our 
lives become complete entities. He is an inex- 
haustible source of inspiration; he is a purpose 
that shall never be fulfilled and yet continues to 
invite us with the possibility of fulfillment. To 
become his disciple and do his will is a task never 
finished and yet never wearisome. He is the all- 
inclusive ideal, ever alluring and never realized. 


1$5 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


Business, pleasure, family, love, benevolence—no 
one of these things is big enough to girdle all our 
life and bind it into one consistent unity. We may 
imagine Paul himself in the days before his conver- 
sion, discontented, unsatisfied, seeking eagerly, yet 
not hopefully, for some ultimate truth; a man of 
scholarly attainments, but of restless temperament, 
his whole life broken up by contradictory alle- 
giances; to Judaism, to Greek philosophy, to Ro- 
man statecraft, to ambition and to a yearning in- 
stinct for personal communion with the Divine. 
Then, in the midst of his violent, chaotic and un- 
happy career, Jesus Christ comes into his life and 
all these interests are gathered together and given 
a single direction. As the thought and observa- 
tion of the astronomer were integrated in the 
theory of a solar system, so Paul’s life integrated 
itself in Christ. So potent is this process of har- 
monization, or sanctification, in the producing of 
blessedness, that, from his imprisonment, bound in 
chains and facing death, he gives expression to 
those rhapsodies of spiritual joy and thanksgiving 
which are so often to be found in his later writings. 

What is your life? Is it a dismembered maze 
of contradictory motives? Are you harassed, un- 
certain, wavering, double-minded, ineffective, eas- 
ily discouraged, all too often tempted, constantly 
diverted from your undertakings? Do you find it 
impossible to keep your resolutions and to carry 
out your intentions? Do you believe one thing 


156 


INTEGRATING THE INDIVIDUAL 


and do another? What you need is a platform, a 
consciously adopted policy, a hypothesis, a plan of 
life. You need to be committed to a master who 
can give a single direction to all the powers and 
purposes of your soul. You want Christ, in whom 
all the elements of your life shall be made to hold 
together. You shall have pleasure, you shall suc- 
ceed in business, you shall minister to your family, 
you shall follow learning, you shall fulfill your 
ambitions, you shall know love, and all these shall 
be bound together and held to one direction by 
Him in whom all things are consistent. 

This is Paul’s setting forth of the underlying 
principles of happiness and peace which the psy- 
chologists now celebrate as the Freudian Wish. 
Far from making a man an impractical dreamer, 
taking him out of the world, or making him into 
a religious crank, to become a true disciple of Jesus 
Christ stabilizes him, gives him direction, provides 
him with a saving mixture of idealism and practi- 
cal ambition and, above all, builds up in him a 
courage that is born of faith and will not accept 
defeat. In Christ work and play, duty and desire, 
good health and appetite, obligation and inclina- 
tion point in one direction and the soul is free. 


157 


THE MAN WHO HATED LIFE 


SOMETIMES there falls upon the mind a chilling 
doubt as to the validity of life. Does it keep its 
promises? Is there any real connection between 
being good and being happy? In youth we were 
taught that virtue brought its own rewards, that 
the sinner was always miserable and that to be 
industrious and faithful was, inevitably, to suc- 
ceed. We were urged to learn our lessons well, 
on the ground that education was a sure means of 
satisfaction. When we grew older we learned 
that parenthood was one of life’s chief joys and 
that there was no pleasure like that of sacrificing 
self for those who were dependent on us. All 
these things we believed and on them we planned 
our lives. 

From time immemorial these things have been 
told to young people because it is the experience 
of mankind that they are, on the whole, true. We 
tell them to our children and never confess that 
we are anything but certain about them. Yet, 
times do come when we doubt them. Things seem 
not to have turned out in accordance with our 
maxims. We have worked hard and yet are not 
as happy nor as prosperous as we think we deserve 
to be. ‘The game has gone wrong somewhere. 

158 


THE MAN WHO HATED LIFE 


The connection between doing right and being 
happy seems unsure. The rearing of a family has 
been a joy, but a somewhat tempered one. Our 
children display little appreciation of the sacrifices 
we have made for them; they have minds of their 
own, it seems, and they prefer their own way to 
our wisdom. When we look back at the years we 
spent getting an education and then consider the 
success of men who can hardly read, we have our 
doubts about knowledge being power. As to the 
sure rewards of our industry, even if we have suc- 
ceeded to the full of our ambition, we sometimes 
look back on our busy years and, considering our 
present health and state of mind, we doubt very 
seriously whether we have not been swindled, 
whether we have not been charged too much for 
the measure of success that we have gained. “I’ve 
worked hard all my life,” said a dying man to his 
friend, “I’ve been successful; and yet I’ve never 
had anything I really wanted.” ‘This is not an 
uncommon state of mind. ‘There is an appalling 
number of people who, having found many things, 
have not yet found happiness. 

The Book of Ecclesiastes was written by a man 
who had passed through this mood of disillusion- 
ment. He had made great plans for himself and 
had won great success, yet in spite of all his labor, 
life had not turned out according to his expecta- 
tions. Its promises failed of fulfillment. He had 
succeeded in getting everything which, according 


159 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


to the world’s teaching, should contribute to hap- 
piness. He had a beautiful home, a great fortune, 
a taste for music and the arts, a delight in lovely 
things and a keen and cultivated mind; yet he 
found that, having gotten everything, nothing con- 
tented him. So he meditated on the fruitless repe- 
titions of life, wherein men labor endlessly for a 
satisfaction which never comes. ‘‘One generation 
cometh, and another goeth,” he complains. ‘The 
sun ariseth and the sun goeth down and hurrieth 
back to its place where it ariseth again. The wind 
blows south and the wind blows north. The rivers 
run into the sea and yet the sea is never full.” 
Life is just a round of monotonous and empty 
routine. ‘‘All things are full of a weariness that 
man cannot utter; the eye is not satisfied with see- 
ing nor the ear with hearing; that which hath been 
is that which shall be and there is nothing new 
under the sun.”’ This was the unhappy conclusion 
of a successful man, who had commanded the 
means both of power and of pleasure. He had 
builded him houses, amused himself with gardens, 
surrounded himself with luxury and yet ‘‘all was 
vanity and a striving after wind and there was no 
profit under the sun.” Nothing was worth having; 
nothing was worth doing. ‘‘So,” he says, “I 
hated life.”’ 

Sometimes, it seems that our work is neither 
useful nor fruitful. When this mood is on us, all 
our efforts are to no valuable end. The lawyer 

160 


THE MAN WHO HATED LIFE 


concludes that in former times the law may have 
been a great profession, but that now it has come 
on evil days; the merchant becomes sick of buying 
and selling and wishes he had been a lawyer; the 
preacher considers the indifference of men to his 
message and wonders if he would not have been a 
happier man if he had chosen a money-making 
vocation. Israel, mourning before Jehovah, was 
made to say, ‘“‘We have wrought no deliverance 
in the earth.” Mrs. Oliphant, doubtless in a mood 
of disillusioned discouragement, inscribed that 
text on the title page of one of her novels. Charles 
Spurgeon, one of the greatest preachers of the 
nineteenth century, wrote to his friend, Bishop 
Thorold, charging himself with uselessness, at a 
time when thousands waited on his weekly words. 
Samuel Johnson, who produced, single-handed, a 
Dictionary of the English language, and became 
the man whose opinion on matters of learning and 
literature was most eagerly sought of all the men 
of his time, frequently expressed a conviction that 
he had done little with his life. “I have wasted 
my life,’”’ he said, “in a morning bed.” 

It is not always our own fault that as we look 
back upon our lives we see too little of accomplish- 
ment. We must be just to ourselves at this point. 
It is not true that opportunity always comes to 
those who are prepared for it, for many men and 
women are conscious that they have prepared 
laboriously, and that the opportunity has not come. 


161 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


We have been ready and have been conscious of 
our power, but the way was not opened to us and 
we have gone through life with a sense of lying 
fallow for want of occasion. ‘There is, after all, 
something fortuitous in success and failure. Rich- 
ard Watson Gilder, poet of charming workman- 
ship and many years editor of the Century Maga- 
zine, told in one of his letters how he enlisted in 
the army at the time of the Civil War. He was 
a boy of nineteen or so. It was just before the 
battle of Gettysburg and he was sent with some 
artillery to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. As the 
regiment came to Carlisle it was met by the ladies 
of the city who had prepared a collation for the 
soldiers. While the hungry and travel-worn men 
were eating, the cry was sounded, ““The rebels are 
coming!’’ A lively fight ensued for the possession 
of the city. Young Gilder was number one on a 
cannon. He and his fellows charged it with pow- 
der, rammed the ball home and waited at the place 
appointed. ‘The skirmish came to an end and still 
they waited. They were never ordered to fire. 
Those boys pulled that wretched cannon about 
through the mud of Pennsylvania during the re- 
mainder of the campaign and never had an oppor- 
tunity to fire that charge. The war came to an 
end and they never heard the sound of their own 
powder. It is exactly so that sometimes men are 
prepared and uncalled for. If they have not done 
162 


ED Be VERONA WeEtO FAI Ee DD TED 


great things in the vineyard, it is, in truth, because 
no man hath hired them. 

And sometimes opportunity waits so long that 
we are tempted to disbelieve in those old saws 
which promise to everyone a reward for his labor. 
We become like the man in the seventy-third Psalm 
whose feet had well-nigh slipped when he saw the 
prosperity of the wicked. “It is all very well to 
talk about the joys of preaching the gospel,” said 
a disheartened minister, ‘“‘but I have learned in 
the bitter school of disappointment that gaudy 
worthlessness often succeeds while honest efforts 
are neglected.” “A man of merit is never neg- 
lected,’ said Doctor Johnson; but I believe he 
would, in another mood, have cited many instances 
to show that sometimes good work does go unap- 
preciated. In the Morgan collection in New 
York, Thoreau’s manuscript of his diary was ap- 
praised at $50,000. It is not altogether reassur- 
ing to remember that in his lifetime Thoreau 
peddled his diary about from publisher to pub- 
lisher and could not sell it at any price. “I re- 
turned,” says this writer of Ecclesiastes, ‘and saw 
that the race is not to the swift nor the battle to 
the strong neither yet is bread to the wise nor 
riches to men of understanding nor yet favor to 
men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to 
them all.’”’ The race, we must admit, is not al- 
ways to the swift nor the battle to the strong. 
‘‘No man,’ said Napoleon, “will seek epaulettes 

163 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


on the field of battle when he can get them in the 
ante-chamber.”’ And so, as we think of these 
things, the mood of dissatisfaction possesses us. 

Sometimes you may feel that you have been the 
victim of a tragic hoax. You have done your 
honest best and life has turned against you with 
misfortune after misfortune. Why should you 
fail while others succeed? Why should your child 
be taken from you while others are left? Why 
should your health break down while so many men 
of evil character are spared? Why should you 
be made to suffer for your sins while other and 
greater sinners go scot-free? In that remarkable 
human document, the journal of Marie Baskirt- 
seff, we read that when she was told she had con- 
sumption’ she cried, “Is 1t I,,O0 God?) Isitwinee 
I?” The whole world seems wrong when our part 
in it seems wrong. ‘The writer of Ecclesiastes felt 
that the universe was badly put together, because, 
after all his labor, he was not content. ‘‘AIl the 
labor of man is for his mouth,” he said, “‘yet his 
appetite is not satisfied.” 

This condition of discouragement with the con- 
stitution of things may lead us in one of two 
directions; either into a bitter and hopeless cyn- 
icism or else into the search for a valid satisfac- 
tion. The conditions that depress us are not due 
to any fault in our economic situation because these 
times of depression come to men of wealth as 
well as to men of poverty. They are not due to 

164 


HE MAN’! WHO HATED UIFE 


the degree in which we are esteemed for our ef- 
forts by our fellowmen, nor in which our contri- 
butions to the world’s good are recognized, for 
they attack with equal virulence the obscure and 
the famed. They are due purely to the limitations 
of human insight. We become so preoccupied with 
the things that are around us and near us that we 
lose our understanding of essential meanings. ‘The 
very fact that a man should suppose that he could 
get happiness out of houses and gardens and sing- 
ers and fountains and works of art is evidence 
that he has been blind to the eternal facts of life. 
The man in the seventy-third Psalm found an an- 
swer to the problem that was robbing him of peace. 
He says that all these neglects and injustices were 
a burden to his mind and heart until he went into 
the sanctuary of God; then he understood. The 
writer of Ecclesiastes finds his answer in the same 
way. “Though a sinner,” he says, “should do 
evil a hundred times and his days be prolonged, 
yet surely I know that it shall be well with them 
that fear God.’ When our lives are dedicated, 
not to the world with its uncertain justice, but to 
God, then we are free from life’s inequalities. 
When you work not for men’s praise nor men’s 
_money, but for the conviction within your soul that 
you are a laborer in the vineyard of the Almighty, 
then you will find your happiness in your work it- 
self and not in the reward you receive for your 
work. 


165 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


“T have seen the toil which God hath given to 
the sons of men,” says the writer of Ecclesiastes, 
‘also He hath put eternity into their hearts.” 
Here are two of life’s greatest blessings, without 
which all others shall not avail to make us happy. 
Whatever else we possess, we must have useful 
work to do, and the hope of the eternal to sustain 
us. We must have a real touch with the practical 
world and an inner compulsion toward the world 
of the spirit, if we are to live a complete life. 

And these two are really one, if we see them 
truly. The test of a man’s work is the eternal 
quality he puts into it, and the test of his faith is 
the labor in which he dedicated it. As ‘“‘faith is 
dead without works,” so work is a lifeless thing 
when it is unmixed with faith. The man who does 
not see the end of his task from the beginning, its 
relation to the task of which it is a part, its rela- 
tion to the whole task of mankind and its kinship 
to the creative providence of God, loses the joy of 
labor and easily becomes a drudge, a slave, driven 
to his daily work by the whip of necessity. And 
~ the pious idler, who spends his days apart from 
the ordinary concerns of men, will never know the 
joy of his Lord, who was a man of work. A use- 
ful task in hand and an eternal hope in heart— 
these are twin blessings of a contented life. 

‘T shall be satisfied,” is the most complete con- 
fession of faith in God. To come to the middle 
years of life, realizing the emptiness of much we 


166 


DEE OMAN WHO HATED EEE 


once thought full to the brim of satisfying reality, 
yet holding fast our courage and our faith in the 
ultimate justice of God’s will, is to find the way to 
an old age that shall be filled with serene content- 
ment. If eternity is in a man’s heart he need not 
be so desperately solicitous concerning what is in 
his house or on his breakfast table. If he seeks 
eternal things he will not exhaust the powers of 
his manhood amassing temporal things which, at 
last, will seem vanity of vanities to him. To seek 
first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, 
and let all else come or stay as it will, is to seek 
that in which the soul shall find enduring satis- 
faction. 

This is the conclusion to which the writer of 
Ecclesiastes came after having tried to find satis- 
faction in worldly success and after seeking con- 
tentment in the possession of things. “Let us 
hear the conclusion of the whole matter,” he says. 
“Fear God and keep his commandments, for this 
is the whole of man.” 

What hath a man for all his labor? Is the 
game worth while? If the game of life is played 
for the sake of the bauble we may get as a prize 
for crowding our fellows out of our way, it is not 
worth while; but if it is a thing done for its own 
sake and because it fits us for that yet more abun- 
dant life toward which each day is a day’s jour- 
ney, then, with all its tribulations, it 1s full of joy. 


167 


NEVERTHELESS 


A coop Scottish friend of mine, a lady of some 
two hundred pounds avoirdupois, had suffered a 
slight misfortune. Her minister, then a student 
in theology, called to express his sympathy. ‘Ah, 
weel,” she said, with a sigh, “‘it’s naething new to 
me. I’ve ever been like a sparrow alone on the 
housetop.” She did not look the part; but her 
feeling was sincere and her knowledge of scrip- 
ture accurate. The man who wrote the one hun- 
dred and second Psalm held a view of his own 
life like that of many of our friends, to whom 
religion is a sighing affair. “I am like a pelican 
in the wilderness,” he said; “I am like a sparrow 
alone upon the housetop.”’ ‘To people with this 
habit of mind, disappointment is an expected guest. 
The greatest of all disappointments, to them, are 
those occasions on which they are not disappointed, 
when the picnic day shines clear and when trusted 
men prove true. 

There are two ways of meeting life’s difficulties. 
You may take the pelican view and count yourself 
a saint in suffering; or you may look on your sea 
of troubles as did the Apostle Paul, whose life 
was full of dark days, of threatening and storms, 
who had endured beatings, imprisonments, ship- 

168 


NEVERTHELESS 


wreck, hunger, sickness and betrayal. ‘In Asia,” 
he says, “I was crushed. I wrote to you in sore 
distress, in misery of heart and with many a tear.” 
He speaks of his outward man perishing day by 
day and of a “‘thorn in the flesh” that must have 
been a torture to him. He was having just the 
kind of trouble that the psalmist was having, but 
he never once thought of himself as a pelican in 
the wilderness or a sparrow alone on a housetop. 
‘‘T am confident,” he says. ‘I am not ashamed.”’ 
“T believe.” “I can do all things.” “I am not 
afraid to boast.” “I have fought a good fight.”’ 
“T am not the least of the Apostles.” “I am an 
ambassador of Christ.”’ He thinks of himself as 
an athlete, pressing toward the prize, as a soldier, 
armed for conquest and competent to achieve it. 
In all the writings of this man whose life was 
so full of privation, pain and sacrifice, there is not 
a line to indicate that he ever took the pelican 
view of human existence. 

‘Without were fightings, within were fears, 
nevertheless God .. .” Here is the secret of this 
ereat man’s greatness. “It is God,” he says, ‘‘that 
establishes me, confirms me, stamps me with his 
seal. Wherever I go God makes my life a con- 
stant pageant of triumph for Christ.” ‘Though 
I am unknown, yet I am celebrated. ‘Though I 
seem to be dying, yet here I am after many a 
battle, alive and thankful. Though I am a pauper, 
yet all things are mine. Without a penny I am 

169 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


yet enriched with the unsearchable riches of God.” 

Now in your life and mine there come days 
when there are fightings around us and fears 
within. No life that is productive is free from 
conflict. It is literally and always true, as the 
eleventh psalm implies, that the wicked bend their 
bows, in secret, to shoot at the upright in heart. 
The world is filled with perils which every one of 
us must face if we are to go forward to the con- 
quests of life. But it is the blessed power of 
Christian faith that it enables us to behold the 
fightings that are around us and be unafraid. It 
is the consequence of a true religious view of life 
that we may look facts in the face and keep tran- 
quil. There is a kind of shallow optimism that 
persuades itself that every cloud has a silver lin- 
ing and that somehow and sometime everything 
will come all right. But this is not the spirit of 
the Apostle. Unstatistical optimism is a nuisance. 
The man who will not see the perils that beset his 
path is far from wise. Paul saw clearly the facts 
of life. He did not deceive himself about them. 
He did not shut his eyes to misery or pain or sin. 
He could look these things in the face steadily, 
because he believed that while they existed there 
also existed the redemptive power of God in the 
world. 

The religious life is not a comfortable life; it is 
a comforted life. To the spiritually competent 
person the evil powers of the world hold no terror 

170 


NEVERTHELESS 


because he is vividly conscious of the resistant force 
within himself. To him there is always an im- 
penetrable refuge from the most outrageous for- 
tune or the most persistent persecution. It is for 
this reason that the reading of the Bible is of great 
value to any soul seeking happiness in untoward 
circumstances. Its writers were men who saw the 
fact of the divine as the controling fact of human 
existence. In spite of all that an hostile world 
could do to them, God remained as their shield 
and stay. Even this psalmist, who began his poem 
by picturing himself as a pelican in the wilderness, 
ends it with the assurance that, though the heavens 
perish, yet God shall endure and He will cause the 
concerns of His servants to be established. 

There is enough trouble in every life, however 
fortunately situated, to furnish material for con- 
tinual complaint, if we choose to take the com- 
plaining view of existence. And there is enough © 
evidence of the goodness of life in the experience 
of the least fortunate of us to turn our mourning 
into song, if only we will teach ourselves to see. 
Somewhere in the circumstances of each afflicted 
soul there is a “nevertheless” in which the springs 
of consolation are to be found. 

In the life of Paul there were at least three of 
these sources of comfort and encouragement. 
First there was his work. From his prison he 
writes in joyful strain because his own suffering 
has seemed to work out to the furtherance of the 


171 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


task to which he had given his life. Let anyone, 
who has a bit of work to do, thank God. If he 
looks on it as the mere means of getting money 
wherewith to buy what he needs or wants, he is a 
miserable drudge; but if he has that faith whereby 
he can link up his humble task with the labor of 
humanity, then he is a partner with all history 
and a co-worker with the divine. 

The second ingredient of the apostle’s cure for 
the pelican view of life is friendship. “God,” he 
says, ‘‘who comforteth the dejected, comforted me 
by the coming of Titus, and not by his coming 
only but by the assurance he brought of your 
affection and friendship.”’ We do not want to find 
too much fault with the psalmist, but it is signifi- 
cant that he conceived himself to be alone like the 
sparrow on the housetop. ‘There is no need for 
any man to be alone. The world is full of friend- 
ship and in the dreariest hours friendship glows 
with the purest light. We remember how Jesus 
craved the presence of his friends in the critical 
hours of his mission, how he loved to make his 
way to Bethany, where friends had their home, 
and how, in the garden of Gethsemane, when his 
heart was breaking, it comforted him to know that 
Peter and James and John were not far off. There 
is no comfort, no hope, no strength, no religion in 
loneliness. As the sun floods the day with light 
and warmth, so God has filled the world with sym- 
pathy and love. It is a part of our duty to love 

Lae 


NEVERTHELESS 


men and to deserve their love as it is to enter into 
communion with Him. It may be well enough 
to get money, skill, fame or power, but no man has 
succeeded who has not accumulated friendships. 
Our friends may not be saints, but their friend- 
ship is one of the choice gifts of God, and even 
when they are absent from us, as Paul was com- 
forted by the knowledge that his Corinthian 
friends were thinking of him, so we are made 
stronger by the consciousness that we are not for- 
gotten. 

There are dark hours in every life. There are 
times when it seems as if we shall not be able to 
bear the things we are called on to endure. There 
are times when our task drags on us like a load 
on a beast of burden; there are times when our 
own hearts fail us and we condemn ourselves. 
“Nevertheless God,” says Paul. When our other 
sources of strength have failed us the eternal and 
unfailing source remains. Without us is strife and 
quarreling, the clamor of contending parties, the 
threats of the violent and the rebellions of the dis- 
contented; within us there are shuddering qualms 
of fear when we measure our own puny power 
against that with which we must contend; never- 
theless God is with us, and if He be for us, who 
can be against us? In the eleventh Psalm the poet, 
who is in anything but the pelican mood, has been 
thinking of these things, and he cries out in indig- 
nant protest, ‘“Why do you say to my soul, ‘Flee 


173 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


as a bird to your mountain?’ Why do you seek 
to frighten me with whisperings of warning that 
the wicked are bending the bow and making the 
arrow ready upon the string? Why do you darkly 
suggest that the foundations of justice are de- 
stroyed and that there is no hope for good men 
in the earth? Behold, I answer, ‘God is on his 
throne. All that passes in this world He sees. 
He tries the righteous and the wicked, and he will 
see that justice shall prevail. Therefore in God 
do I take refuge and I shall not fear what the evil 
of the world may do to me.’”” Here, some hun- 
dreds of years before Paul’s time, was a man who 
passed through the same experience and found 
final comfort in the one unchanging fact of God, 
and here, some centuries after his time, we face 
the same tribulations and find the same comfort 
in the same eternal fact. 

No life that is worth living can escape the slings 
and arrows of outrageous fortune. Unrequited 
toil, misdirections of trust, disappointed hopes, de- 
feated purposes—all these are as sure to come into 
the life as wintry days are sure to succeed the 
warmth of summer. Man is born to trouble as 
the sparks fly upward. Nevertheless God com- 
forteth us. He opens to us the Book of Life, 
wherein are written the stories of men who went 
through deep waters and were not overwhelmed. 
He awakens in us the qualities of self-giving 
whereby we bind to ourselves friends as with 

174 


i NEVERTHELESS 
hooks of steel. And He besets us before and be- 


hind with his own presence. So we have peace. 
‘‘And not only so, but we glory in tribulations, 
because the love of God is shed abroad in our 
hearts.” 


175 


THE BLESSINGS OF BONDAGE 


‘“REMEMBER my bonds.” These are words from 
a letter written by a man in prison to his friends. 
He had been opening their vision to new and gor- 
geous life. He had urged them to look beyond 
the things of this world, to lift their thoughts to 
eternal truth and to fix their affections on things 
above. He had shown them the way to peace, a 
peace that is deep and divine, and he had exhorted 
them to ‘‘put on the new man and put off the old,” 
which process would result, he promised, in new 
and blessed relations between husbands and wives, 
parents and children, masters and servants. He 
is opening doors for these people, showing them 
the way to a freer life, and he ends by asking 
them to remember that he who writes is a pris- 
oner, bound in chains. ‘Remember my bonds.” 
It is a pathetic little parenthesis, slipped in amidst 
the Apostle’s visions of eternal liberty. 

It would be hard to overestimate the repugnance 
of such a man to bondage. He was a man of 
surpassing energy, glorying in his freedom. There 
was work to do, of world significance, and he knew 
that none but himself had been appointed to do it. 
The world was dying for the very thing which he, 
of all men, could best give it. He was the Apostle 

176 


THE BLESSINGS OF BONDAGE 


of the living God. And he was in jail! One might 
suppose he would pace the floor, calling out for 
God to slay him or to release him, raging against 
the cruel circumstances that kept him cribbed up 
in captivity; but there is nothing of the kind dis- 
cernible in his writings from that prison place. 
He speaks of the care of all the churches being 
upon him, of his dealings with friends who come 
and go, of his letters to other groups of Christians 
and of his confidence that, though he is a prisoner, 
yet his work is not at a standstill. But is he satis- 
fied to sit immured there ina Roman prison? Not 
for a moment. He dreams of freedom. He 
writes his friends to prepare him lodgings against 
the day of his release. Alas, it is almost certain 
that he never saw those rooms, so lovingly pre- 
pared for a man who had suffered. He talks of a 
voyage to Spain. One may picture him, sitting 
dreamy and silent, meditating on the sunny slopes 
he hoped to see. Castles in Spain they verily were, 
for Paul never saw them; yet, like a vastly differ- 
ent man of later time, James Boswell, he might 
well boast that he lived in them. 

We have all felt, at times, like prisoners. There 
are few who do not think themselves capable of 
living a life of wider range than has ever been 
permitted them. Though, to some extent, we are 
the architects of our own fortunes, we know very 
well that the architect is always limited in his work 
by the ground on which he must build, by the ma- 


177 


CHARACTER AND EVP PENS 


terials that are given him and by the particular 
purpose for which his building is intended. He 
cannot fulfill his dream of a gothic masterpiece in 
a canning factory, nor can be put a row of doric 
columns around a bungalow. He may dream of a 
lofty tower all his life and yet be compelled by 
the necessities of making a living to spend all his 
days erecting unpoetic shops and uninspired apart- 
ment houses. It is much the same with all of us. 
However wide may be the range of our lives, there 
is still some path forbidden which we long to tread. 
And, with the vast majority of us, that which we 
are allowed to do and see is but the smallest frac- 
tion of that to which our souls aspire. We are 
prisoners within the little circle of our circum- 
stances and our happiness will depend on whether 
or not we learn to be contented there and to range 
in the spirit through those distant places which 
shall ever be unseen of our mortal eyes. 

The salvation of the world, said Carlyle, is 
assured by the certainty of heroes being born into 
it. These are the men who, in spite of deterring 
circumstances, do the work that is laid on them 
to do. ‘‘We went into Spurgeon’s Tabernacle this 
morning,’’ writes a diarist in 1872; “I had never 
looked on such a sea of faces before. ... Mr. 
Spurgeon was so lame from rheumatism that he 
used two canes and placed one knee on a chair be- 
side him when preaching. His text was, ‘And 
there shall be a new heaven and a new earth.’”’ Is 

178 


THE BLESSINGS OF BONDAGE 


your imagination too dull to enable you to read 
the tragedy of pain behind this little picture? The 
great preacher, after a sleepless night in which 
the very sheets were a torture to his wracked 
limbs, dragging himself forward to the pulpit on 
canes, yet swaying by his visions of all things new 
an audience of thousands; surely here are bonds 
no less real than the steel manacle with which 
Paul was chained to a Roman soldier, and here is 
a soul no more bound by them. 

There is consolation in the thought that the 
great are not immune from the weaknesses and 
limitations of ordinary men. We consider the 
bonds of the apostle and we are comforted. We 
ought to be more than comforted; we ought to 
be inspired, perhaps rebuked. At least such reflec- 
tion should cure us of that self-pity which is alike 
the paralysis of usefulness and the death of hap- 
piness. Our sense of compassion was never given 
us to spend on ourselves. When we begin to be 
sorry for ourselves we take the first step in cow- 
ardice. We do have our troubles. There are 
bonds on our wrists. But it does not follow that, 
because there is somewhere a miscarrtage in jus- 
tice, the universe is badly put together. The finest 
thing an unfortunate man can do 1s to put his own 
misfortune aside when he appraises life. You 
may be deaf, but it does not follow that there is no 
music in the world. 

We are too prone to excuse ourselves for un- 


179 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


productive and self-indulgent lives on the score of 
limitations which we cannot cure. It is good for 
us to remember that the greatest work ever done 
by men was done by men of like limitations with 
ourselves. ‘The Apostle suffered all his life long 
with ill health, so that he was obliged to be in the 
constant care of a physician. Luke, who wrote 
the third gospel, was the man who gave what he 
had to make the career of Paul possible and what 
he had was a physician’s skill. Let us stop at this 
point a moment. We think of this letter as an 
epistle of Paul the Apostle. But other men con- 
tributed to it and we must not forget them. First 
there was this same Luke, without whose care it 
is not likely that the apostle would have been able 
to do his work. Second there was the unknown 
man who actually did the writing. Paul seems to 
have been unable to write more than a few words 
at a time, owing to some trouble with his eyes. 
Five times in different letters he mentions the fact 
that he is writing the salutation, or signature, with 
his own hand and in the closing lines of the letter 
to the Romans, we read a little greeting, slipped 
in by the man who was at that time acting as his 
amanuensis, “I, Tertius, who wrote this epistle, 
salute you.” If Tertius was eyes and hands to 
Paul, Tychicus was feet, for it was he who set 
out over the unfriendly road, to deliver to the 
Colossians the message the Apostle could not bring 
himself. 
180 


THE BLESSINGS OF BONDAGE 


Now it is just so that each one of us is in bonds, 
but the bonds of each are different. And each of 
us is free, but the freedom of each is different. 
And so we join ourselves together, each one giving 
what he has that the whole may be made complete. 
When your architect friend finds his opportunity 
to realize the tower he has dreamed, the hands 
and bodies and brains of a thousand men must be 
added to his own before the work can be done. 
This is what the Apostle means when he talks of 
diversities of gifts and likens the church to a body 
with hands, feet, mouth, eyes, and ears. To one 
it is given to do one part of the work, to another 
some other part, according to the limitations and 
abilities of each. So the whole body, he says, “‘fitly 
joined together and compacted by that which every 
joint supplieth, according to the effectual working 
in the measure of every part, maketh increase of 
the body unto the building up of itself in love.” 

There is help in the realization that none of us 
is called to accomplish everything, and that none 
of us is excluded by our limitations from con- 
tributing something to the sum of human good. 
We shall all be happier when we have come to the 
conclusion that this small thing or that is our own 
work and that we intend to be useful and happy 
with fulfilling it. I have always liked Emerson’s 
lines wherein he makes the mountain and the squir- 
rel argue about their respective places in the cos- 

181 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


mic scheme. The mountain speaks slightingly of 
the squirrel and the squirrel answers: 


“T think it no disgrace 
To occupy my place, 
If I am not so large as you, 
You are not so small as I; 
If I cannot carry forests on my back, 
Neither can you crack a nut.” 


It is a courageous and correct view of life and 
we know very well that any squirrel who takes 
such a view of himself will find the business of 
being a squirrel mightily interesting. 

We are reminded, furthermore, that our bonds 
are not as inflexible as steel. Burge Harrison tells 
us that one of the most successful marine painters 
of recent years was so color blind that he could 
tell red from green only by their places on his 
palette. We may be bound but we are not in a 
straightjacket. We can move. Paul’s failure in 
eyesight did not affect his spiritual insight. Ter- 
tius could not compose a masterpiece, but he could 
transcribe one to parchment and make it available 
for the centuries to read; Tychicus may have been 
no preacher, but he could carry a preacher’s mes- 
sage; and Luke, wanting the superabundant spirit- 
ual power of his friend, could yet devote his life 
to caring for the body in which that power had its 
mortal existence. ‘Thus all this little group of 
friends were doing the same thing, that is, doing 
their best with what they had, working honestly 

182 


THE BLESSINGS OF BONDAGE 


and courageously in spite of the bonds which pre- 
vented them from doing all they yearned to do. 

We are likely to be poor judges of the out- 
reach of our lives. One remembers a little school- 
teacher who came into the town of Litchfield, 
something like a century ago. One can imagine 
her longing for a place in life from which she was 
excluded by circumstances and ill-health. One can 
easily think of her wondering if the struggle were 
worth while. Half a century afterward whatever 
doubts she may have had were answered, and we 
hope that, somehow, she heard. There was a 
great audience in a great church and the greatest 
preacher in America was speaking. This is what 
Henry Ward Beecher said in 1874: ‘There came 
to Litchfield, when I was about eight years old, a 
tall, slender creature. Her name I have forgot- 
ten, if I ever knew it. So delicate and attenuated 
was she that the sun seemed to shine through her. 
Whereas, before, in that hateful old schoolhouse, 
I had been cabined and cribbed and curbed and 
pinched and whipped for not learning what was 
not taught me, there came this spectre of a human 
being, whose eyes were lustrous of another world 
and whose heart was full of gentleness and rich- 
ness. Nor can I remember that she ever opened 
a book to me. I can only remember her as a 
dream, but I feel to this hour, and distinctly, that 
many of the things I say to you were born of the 
influence of that woman, who, if I mistake not, 

183 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


taught in that school but a single summer. I have 
long been preaching and it may be that many 
preachers who have gone forth from this church 
have derived influences from me, and they in their 
teaching are unconsciously indebted to her. She 
lives in a strength that never dies, born again in 
each generation of men who carry forward the 
influence that she brought to bear on my heart.” 

Another half century has passed and _to- 
day there are men influencing the lives of thou- 
sands who are indebted to Henry Ward Beecher 
as to no other man. Few men have influenced 
the American pulpit as did he. How strange it 
is that a century after that sick little woman 
came diffiidently to Litchfield to take up a burden 
too great for her frail body, we should be brought 
to recognize her influence as it has come down the 
decades and now contributes to the quality of those 
hours in which we worship God. If, from many 
a place of worship, men and women come on Sun- 
day morning strengthened and encouraged, it is 
because, in some real measure, she did her best, a 
hundred years ago, in spite of her bondage of 
physical infirmity. 

Sometimes we define and delimit ourselves in 
an arbitrary way, seeking to make our bonds an 
excuse for failing to render what we ought. “You 
know,’ a man will say, “I ama business man. Of 
course I can be of no use in religious matters.” 
“Of course you know,”’ says another, “that I am 

184 


THE BLESSINGS OF BONDAGE 


a poor man. I cannot give, much as I should 
like to do so. Now if only I had a few millions, 
I should do wonders with them.” Some men 
seem to think that it would be as vain to ask a 
business man to take a definite part in the spiritual 
salvation of the world as it would be to expect 
Emerson’s squirrel to leave off cracking his nuts 
and begin to sing. 

When we feel the limitations of our position in 
life it is time for us to strive for some outreach. 
When Paul found himself cribbed into a Roman 
prison, it was more important than ever that he 
should reach out to his friends in Galatia, in 
Colosse and in Philippi, and dream of Spain. To 
sit in despair, concluding that because he was in 
jail no one could rightly expect anything of him 
would have been fatal to his whole after life and 
to his fame as an apostle. It is at the very time 
when we feel our bonds that we can best break 
them. In numberless cases has it been proven so. 
We know of business men who have been like 
pillars of righteousness in their communities 
though they never preached a sermon and would 
have been rendered speechless with fright if they 
had been asked to stand up in public and pray. 
We know of poor men and women who have en- 
riched the world with their lives. Silver and gold 
they had not, but they had what silver and gold 
could not command and they gave it freely. 

We ask the world to remember our bonds, as 

185 


CHARACTER AND: HAPPINESS 


Paul did. We ask men and women to be generous 
with us, to give us some latitude in view of our 
imperfections and our want of abilities. We do 
not judge others according to counsels of perfec- 
tion and we pray that we too may be appraised in 
accordance with charitable human standards. 
Surely it was thus that Jesus judged men and 
women. He always saw their bonds. However 
crippled with the paralysis of sin the man might 
be, still the Savior encouraged him to the under- 
taking of spiritual conquest. When the woman 
dropped two mites into the Lord’s treasury Jesus 
remembered her bonds, the bitter bondage of ex- 
treme poverty, and he praised her for the great 
thing that she had done. When another came and 
anointed his feet, just before his crucifixion, he 
remembered her bonds. She had sinned much and 
suffered much; she had been forgiven much and 
she loved much. ‘“Let her alone,” he said, “‘she 
hath done what she could.” Long before he came 
to his imprisonment at Rome the Apostle had 
learned these things. ‘“‘If there be first a willing 
mind,” he said, ‘‘it is accepted according to what 
a man hath and not according to what he hath 
not.” 

Bondage brings its blessings, no less than free- 
dom. The outer constraint begets in us the effort 
to achieve inner liberty. The preacher’s pain- 
wracked body makes him the more mindful of 
that sphere of the soul in which all things are be- 

186 


THE BLESSINGS OF BONDAGE 


come new. The manacle on the Apostle’s wrist 
becomes the occasion for those poems of the spirit’s 
freedom which have lifted multitudes out of the 
deeper bondage of the flesh. So it is that the 
bonds of our lives are broken. We do the best 
we may with what we have, knowing well that He 
who gives the increase will not suffer our toil to 
come to naught. “Therefore be ye steadfast, un- 
movable, always abounding in the work of the 
Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labor is 
not in vain in the Lord.” 


THE PLACE OF UNDERSTANDING 


THE twenty-eighth chapter of Job is a poetic de- 
scription of a mine. ‘The poet is meditating on 
man’s absorbed devotion to the search for gold 
and silver and precious stones. 


“Man overturneth the mountains by the roots; 
He cutteth out channels among the rocks, 
And his eye seeth every precious thing. 
He bindeth the streams that they trickle not; 
And the thing that is hid bringeth he forth to light. 
But where shall wisdom be found? 
And where is the place of understanding?” 


Where is the place of understanding? With 
all our searching and our getting, we can never be 
at rest until we have found an answer to that ques- 
tion. The writer of this poem might have writ- 
ten the seventy-third psalm. In both poems a 
man, confused and rebellious as he contemplates 
the injustices of life, is searching for mental and 
spiritual peace. Something is wrong with the way 
in which rewards and punishments, successes and 
failures are distributed. The good too often live 
in poverty and neglect while evil men strut about, 
girdled with pride, full of loud boasting, their 
eyes puffed out with self-indulgence, having more 
than heart could wish. Both these poets were 

188 


THE PLACE OF UNDERSTANDING 


tempted to renounce their faith in God and in the 
moral law. Job’s wife, cheerful helpmeet that 
she must have been, advised him to curse God and 
die. The psalmist confesses that he was on the 
brink of moral self-destruction. ‘“‘My steps had 
well-nigh slipped, my feet were almost gone, when 
I saw the prosperity of the wicked. My soul was 
in a ferment, my heart was stabbed, I was as a 
beast.”’ 

The problem to which these men sought an an- 
swer was the one which, in our own day, has turned 
men to Bolshevism, anarchy and other organized 
protests against the maladjustments of this world’s 
affairs. ‘0 some men anything seems better than 
a world in which war and poverty and oppression 
are constant factors. They suppose that they are 
rebelling against some particular system, economic 
or political; the truth is that they are rebelling 
against the age-old fact of human sin. We may 
hope that, as man learns the technique of govern- 
ment and civilization, he will do away with many 
of these evils; but it will be a long process. In 
the meantime, there is one refuge for us who live 
in the world and must make the best of it. It is 
to be found where Job and the Psalmist found 
peace. It is the place of understanding. “I went 
into the house of God,” says the poet; then I un- 
derstood.” In the presence of the Eternal, things 
fell into perspective again. ‘The fear of the 
Lord,” concluded Job, “that is wisdom.” 

189 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


The solution that came to these men must be 
found by everyone who would be happy in this 
blundering world. To understand is the highest 
gift God gives to any man. To be blessed with 
insight, so that we can see beyond the confusions 
and inequities of life, into the meaning of things, 
to be able to discriminate between the essential and 
the superficial, is to enter on the way of peace and 
satisfaction. The Bible constantly celebrates the 
joy of those who have attained to understanding. 
The price of wisdom is above rubies and to miss 
it means the one mistake in life that means misery. 
Men will not shrink from suffering if only they 
can understand that their suffering is not the visita- 
tion of blind chance or a cruelly whimsical provi- 
dence; they will gladly make sacrifices and toil all 
their lives without material reward, if only they 
can believe that some benefit is to accrue; but to 
endure and suffer and see nothing in it all but 
agony, to toil and see no outcome, to live a virtu- 
ous life which seems to lead nowhere, while evil 
men enjoy all the things the world associates with 
success, makes good men despair and turns the 
labor that should bless them into emptiness and 
vexation of heart. 

It is when we see God that we understand. I 
do not mean that religious faith will impart facts 
to the mind in some miraculous way. Religious 
people do not know politics, economics or finance 
any better than other people. One does not learn 

190 


THE PLACE OF UNDERSTANDING 


to speak a language or calculate the movements 
of the planets by the practice of the devotional 
life; nor will the most exemplary piety prove a 
substitute for shrewd competency if one sets up to 
be a merchant. Yet when a man once sees God 
he sees much else. A man of faith may not know 
any more about those scientifically observed 
changes which accompany death than any scorner 
of religious belief; but he does know some things 
concerning death that are of more value to him 
than any amount of empirical knowledge. A de- 
vout man may not know any more about the nature 
and effects of sin than many a moralist who has no 
God, yet when he enters the sanctuary he gains 
insight into that which a lifetime of the study of 
ethical philosophy will not reveal. The religious 
soul may not know as much about the psychological 
effects of prayer as the young savant whose doc- 
tor’s degree is not an hour old, but of its power 
and its practical utility he knows what no man 
may learn save in the attitude of devotion. 
There is a kind of understanding that is of faith 
and the experience of faith. We are told by the 
Apostle that the things of the spirit are spiritually 
discerned. ‘This is no more than to say that the 
things of science are scientifically discerned or the 
things of art are artistically discerned. No man 
expects a cobbler to be competent in questions of 
sculpture. Before the cobbler may tell a good 
statue from a bad, he must pass through a certain 


IgI 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


artistic discipline. ‘There is a spiritual discipline 
through which we must pass before we can come 
to spiritual understanding. Some of the most acute 
difficulties in life lie in that realm which is to be 
penetrated only by the spiritual vision. The psalm- 
ist is tortured by a problem partly economic; but 
no economist can help him. What he wants is 
insight into things beyond the range of economic. 
truth and he finds it in the sanctuary of the living 
God. Where science stops, where worldly wisdom 
reaches its limits, where the eye cannot see nor the 
ear hear, where those things lie of which men 
cannot tell each other but for which all men yearn, 
there faith begins. It is there that the deeper un- 
derstanding is to be attained and where the answers 
to some of the haunting riddles of existence are 
to be found. 

If we are to be happy we must gain that insight 
into ultimate values by which, amid the confusing 
injustices of life, we shall retain our faith in the 
validity of experience. There is much to make 
us doubt whether man, with all his learning, has 
really come to the finality of truth regarding any- 
thing. Some of the most cultivated men have 
found themselves, at the end of life, doubting 
whether any conclusion to which humanity has 
come can be trusted. Somewhere we must find 
something on the truth of which we can depend if 
we are to know happiness. Like the Psalmist, we 
are plagued every day with the wrongness of 

192 


THE PLACE OF UNDERSTANDING 


things, the seemingly wanton perversity with which 
actual events contradict the percepts by which we 
have been taught to order our lives. Virtue is so 
often left to be its own and its only reward that 
even the distinction between right and wrong is 
doubted. When we see the waters of a full cup 
poured out to the selfish profit-taker while men 
who have tried to live usefully and unselfishly are 
compelled to live in neglect and poverty, we are 
tempted to cast away all scruple and plunge head- 
long into the game of getting; or we may take 
refuge in a resolute stoicism, boasting that our 
heads, though bloody, are unbowed; or, again, we 
may school ourselves to bitter laughter and an 
attitude of cynical scorn. But we shall not find 
happiness until we are able to look through the 
perverse waters of daily experience into the calm 
depths where these superficial currents and cross- 
currents are unfelt. 

It was too much preoccupation with the sur- 
face of life that came so near to bringing about 
the moral and spiritual ruin of the Psalmist. 
Jeremiah, the Prophet, passed through the bitter- 
ness of the same experience. ‘“‘Wherefore doth 
the wicked prosper?” he cried. “Why are they 
all happy who deal treacherously?”’ He wanted 
to be assured that the call to righteousness was 
not a cruel hoax and that goodness was really 
worth while. There are times when even the 
Prophet of God wavers as he thinks of those in- 


193 


CHARACTER VAN Dy HAP PN Baa 


justices which would be farcical did they not so 
often involve lifelong disappointment and sorrow. 
Any man who stands at the corner of a fashionable 
street or at the entrance to a gaudy house of 
pleasure and watches the careless, self-indulgent 
crowds who come and go and then thinks of the 
thousands of devoted men and women who are 
wearing down health and strength in unselfish 
service for a miserable pittance, may well be 
tempted to cry out in rebellion. Why does God 
not take the side of the good with more definite- 
ness? Another witness in the Psalms says that in 
a long lifetime he has never seen the righteous 
forsaken nor his children begging bread. We won- 
der if he could give such testimony if he had writ- 
ten in these times. Do the miserable slums of the 
city, where women nurse their babies amid hunger 
and filth, contain no good men and women? We 
know better. One has only to look about him in 
his own community to mark good men, industri- 
ous, useful and godly, whose whole lives are suc- 
cessive chapters of misfortune, and bad men, who 
have gouged their fellowmen with ruthless con- 
sistency, piling up wealth on a foundation of 
shrewd brutality, who all through life enjoy their 
ill-gotten prosperity and in death have long obitu- 
aries and eulogistic tombstones made for them. 
This is one of the facts of human existence 
which we must learn to face and still live happily. 
How shall we do it? Simply by taking the sanc- 
194 


THE PLACE OF UNDERSTANDING 


tuary view of the matter. The reason men lose 
their peace of mind when they consider these mat- 
ters is that they have permitted the world to lead 
them into the folly of materialism. They are set- 
ting too high a value on mere things. They iden- 
tify riches with happiness when, as a matter of 
fact, there is as large a percentage of miserable 
people in big houses as in little ones. When we 
slip into the error of supposing that happiness and 
having are interchangeable terms, we easily fall 
into the further error of supposing that God cares 
nothing for us because He does not give us money 
as the reward of our work. When we go into the 
sanctuary we gain a deeper and truer view. It 
was here, where Isaiah, downhearted and doubt- 
ing, saw the Lord, high and lifted up, that this 
maker of psalms was made to realize that happi- 
ness is not a thing to be reckoned in coins, bonds 
and acres, or even in the approval of his fellow- 
men. He saw that the material profits at which 
the selfish clutch are but the toys of an hour while 
the prize of the high calling of God is an eternal 
possession. He realized that there can be no at- 
tainment so precious as the sense of communion 
with the divine and that happiness is a spiritual 
thing. In the glow of his great discovery he cried 
out, ‘‘Whom have I in heaven but thee, and there 
is nothing on earth that I desire except thee. 
Others may do what they will and get what they 
can, but it is good for me to draw nigh unto God.” 


195 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


The vision in the sanctuary is the way to under- 
standing. We must walk, not by sight but by in- 
sight. That is why the place of worship is never 
quite forsaken, despite all the places of pleasure 
and of profit that invite mankind. Preachers may 
be dull, choirs out of tune and sextons forgetful 
about heat and ventilation; but men and women 
continue to come, even though they grumble. The 
church has many faults, but with them all it has 
one great gift, by which, somehow, it gives world- 
weary people a glimpse into those blessed mys- 
teries which have ever been the restorative of 
souls. 

If your soul is all a-jangle with the discords of 
the world, step out of it all for an hour of self- 
forgetting devotion in the nearest place of wor- 
ship. There, within the walls of the sanctuary 
men and women like yourself have found peace 
and have gone away with truer views and nobler 
purposes. But let no seeker for such blessed hours 
go shopping about the town to find the most ornate 
eloquence or the most expensive music. Let him 
not be lured by novelties and the promise of thrills. 
It is not an hour’s entertainment he is seeking. 
Let him seek a place in which he is sensible that 
he is in the sanctuary of the Most High, where 
his perturbed spirit shall find rest and from whence 
he shall come forth feeling that he has been with 
God. 

“Whence cometh wisdom and where is the place 

196 


Papier leAGCE: OF UNDERSLAN DING 


of understanding?” asks the poet in the Book of 
Job. “God understandeth the way thereof and 
He knoweth the place thereof. And unto man he 
said, Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, 
and to depart from evil is understanding.” ‘My 
feet were almost gone,” says the psalmist, ‘my 
steps had well nigh slipped. I was plagued all 
the day long and my thoughts were a misery to 
me; until I went into the sanctuary of God; then 
I understood; then I awakened as one awakens 
from a horrid dream. I have learned that it is 
good for me to draw near to God. He is the 
strength of my heart and my portion forever.” 


197 


PREREQUISITES TO HAPPINESS 


“Happy are yeif .. .” said Jesus. Happiness 
is a conditional blessing, not an accidental gift. 
Being an art, it requires, first of all, the mastery 
of certain fundamental truths. ‘The beginner with 
the violin must first learn to overcome his natural 
tendency to stick his elbow out and scrape. The 
painter must learn to apply the rules of perspective 
and to curb his desire to put too much into his pic- 
ture. [he writer must learn the transcendent 
value of conciseness and must see for himself that 
style is simplicity. All these lessons have their 
counterparts in the art of living and it may help 
us if we apply a few of them to the guidance of 
our quest for happiness. 

We may teach ourselves at the outset that no 
man may be happy who expects too much. Un- 
happy households are frequently those in which 
the members of the family expect each other to be 
something more than human. Men who are un- 
happy in their daily occupation are usually so be- 
cause they expect more from it than a decent com- 
petence in return for long years of sacrificing la- 
bor. The demand for superfluities is the cause of 
much misery and moral failure. During early 
months of the World War, at a time when the 

198 


Pre reOulstris) LO: HAPPINESS 


Russians were expected to come forward to the 
aid of the Allies, military men wondered why they 
were so slow. The reason was that, prior to the 
exigencies of actual campaign, the Russian specifi- 
cations required that all their projectiles should be 
nickel-plated. Neither the time nor the nickel was 
available for fulfilling these requirements for the 
vast number of shells that were being used on the 
battle front, so the Allies waited while the hosts 
of Germany advanced. There are too many of us 
who expect things in the heat and burden of life 
to be, so to speak, nickel-plated,—the furniture of 
our homes, the conduct of our husband, or wife, 
our children, the ingredients of our daily existence 
and the tools with which we work. We are not 
satisfied with plain and practical furnishings for 
the battle of life. 

One suspects that the young man of great pos- 
sessions who “went away sorrowful” paid for his 
wealth with his one chance of felicity and that 
Zachaeus, when he had the courage to part with 
a half of his possessions, began to know the joy 
of living. Some friends of mine had been given, 
on the occasion of their marriage, a large amount 
of expensive silver. Doubtless the donor thought 
that he was bestowing, upon this young couple of 
very modest means, something in which they would 
find happiness. But it was not so. It became the 
source of the habitual family anxiety. The bur- 
dened bridegroom carried that wretched silver up- 


199 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


stairs every night, carefully thrusting it under the 
bed, and downstairs every morning, for twenty 
years. Whenever the house was to be left for a few 
days “‘The Silver’ had to be boarded out at the 
bank. It was as much a care as a farmer’s live- 
stock. If my friend had taken it with him on a 
fishing trip and gently dumped it overboard, thus 
ridding his life of one anxiety, he would have 
found his porridge just as nourishing when eaten 
with a plated spoon and he would have had one 
less cause for anxiety in his house. 

“Tf I knew what to omit,’’ remarked Stevenson 
in a discussion of English style, ‘I should ask no 
further knowledge.” A perfect paragraph is one 
in which there are no superfluous words or phrases. 
A well-furnished home is one in which there is 
sufficient furniture for comfort and none to stum- 
ble over as you cross the room. A house filled 
with bric-a-brac is like a sentence cluttered with 
adjectives. Many a life would be happier if 
people had the moral courage to throw away half 
of the property that encumbers them and to dis- 
continue half the activities that are supposed to 
contribute to their pleasure. ‘The nerve specialist 
builds up his practice from people who try to put 
more into their days than they will hold. In the 
Hebrew, the word ‘“‘zamar’ means to prune a 
vine; in another form, “‘zamyr,” it signifies a poem 
or a psalm. It is the same word in both cases and 
it implies the same act. The poet, from the full- 

200 


PREREQUISITES TO HAPPINESS 


ness and exuberance of his imagination, chooses a 
gem, here and there, and rejects the rest. It is his 
gift that he can cut down to a dozen or fourteen 
lines the expression of things that other men could 
not make clear in a volume. The painter makes 
his picture beautiful by the process of elimination, 
putting into his picture only those things which 
help to make his message clear and ruthlessly 
omitting all else. Pruning is not alone the art of 
the horticulturist; it is essential to the poet, the 
painter, most certainly to the preacher; and it is 
essential to the person who would make of life a 
thing intelligible and beautiful. The maker of a 
motion picture cuts down his film from two hun- 
dred thousand feet to five thousand before he 
shows it to the public. If only we could bring 
ourselves to do something like that with the super- 
fluous parts of our lives, which only serve to con- 
fuse us and weary us, we should have a better 
chance of happiness. No man ever found happi- 
ness who made it his rule to get all he could and 
to keep all he got. Only he who loses life, said 
Jesus, shall have it. 

There is a great difference between happiness 
and pleasure, though many identify the one with 
the other. A trip around the world may be a 
pleasure; but it cannot make us happy. If a 
woman is unhappy without a set of expensive furs, 
she will be unhappy with them. Things may give 
us pleasure, but happiness is of the inner nature. 

201 


CHARACPER AND ‘HAPPINESS 


Yet pleasure is a good gift of God and it is well 
worth getting and giving. It is good to like games 
and to be diverted by a book or a play. He who 
takes pleasure in nothing is not likely to be a happy 
man. Life must diversify itself; even rosebushes 
are given to what gardeners call “sports,” and, 
essentially, the “sport”? of a rosebush and the sport 
of a human being spring from the same necessity 
for diversification. As the child is father to the 
man, so is play the overture, in which most of us 
express the themes which are, in the years of man- 
hood and womanhood, our contribution to the 
symphony of life. 

One can hardly commit a greater folly than the 
putting away of all those innocent enjoyments by 
which we find rest through the diversion of our 
thought into new and pleasurable avenues; but 
there is little happiness to be found among those 
who depend on the card-table, the theatre and the 
dance to make the hours away from daily duties 
tolerable. People who must be gadding about 
somewhere each night, who are ill at ease after 
dinner until the cards are shuffled, who think of 
cities only as places where there are theatres in 
which to be entertained and shops in which to spend 
money, are strangers to the deeper and more last- 
ing joys of life. Those who like best the simpler 
forms of enjoyment and who pass their leisure 
hours in uncomplicated and restful occupations, 
reserving the more elaborate ways of passing time 

202 


PREREQUISITES TO HAPPINESS 


for those excursions of adventure which we all 
need occasionally, will find time for the cultivation 
of the powers which make for genuine happiness. 
Pleasure is merely a little rest by the way. It is 
good and we take it and are thankful; but never 
let us mistake it for its betters. Lives that are too 
constantly diverted at last become deflected. When — 
we dart away on side-trips too often, the main 
road may become intolerable to us and we spend 
our days gathering pretty flowers when we should 
be getting on in our journey. In every community 
there is a group of people who make it their busi- 
ness to entertain each other. Every night in the 
week they come together to help each other pass 
the dragging hours. It is not hospitality that they 
practice, though of the giving of dinners there 1s 
no end; it is simply a mutual arrangement by which 
no man and wife of them are ever left to pass an 
evening together, lest they bore each other beyond 
bearing. There is no happiness among such people, 
though their lives are given to the pursuit of 
pleasure. 

We have already referred to the folly of want- 
ing things which are mutually exclusive of each 
other. A man may want to be a scholar and a 
race-track celebrity, a money-maker, a golf cham- 
pion, a deacon in the church and a first-nighter at 
all the girly-girly shows; but it is not likely that 
any man will achieve all these things within the 
limits of a single life. If he did achieve them, he 

203 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


would probably discover that, as a collection, they 
would not make for a happy existence. Therefore 
he must determine which, among all his desires, 
are reasonably consistent with one another and 
with his chosen plan of life and he must cast the 
others aside forever. 

A great deal of unhappiness is due to a habit 
of dreaming regretfully about the past. What 
marvellous opportunities we missed! Stephen 
Leacock, in one of his skits, tells how a real-estate 
man took him out to the edge of the city. ‘“T'wenty 
years ago,” said the man, taking in a great section 
of improved city property with his gesture, “you 
could have bought all this for fifty thousand dol- 
lars.’ ‘You mean,” was the answer, ‘“‘that when 
I was a student in college, eating on four dollars 
a week, this opportunity was knocking at my door 
and I missed it?” He turned aside his head in 
bitter shame as he thought of his own folly. Why, 
in those impecunious student days, had he never 
happened to walk out that way with fifty thousand 
dollars in his pocket? 

This is a burlesque of a sort of regret that 
often robs us of our peace. Why did we not do 
thus and so twenty years ago? Why did we not 
marry the son or the daughter of the village mil- 
lionaire, who once smiled at us as we passed? 
Why did we not settle in Keokuk or Kalamazoo 
or Kokomo, instead of in this unappreciative 
town? Why did we not go to college and learn 

204 


PREREQUISITES TO HAPPINESS 


to play the saxophone? Why did we do the things 
we did and why did we not do the things we did 
not? So we fuss and fret and fume about those 
past days when, after all, we did the best we could 
with what we had. That part of life which has 
gone beyond our control, and which has no prac- 
tical contribution to make to the shaping of to- 
morrow, is the part that Paul refers to when he 
says that he forgets what is behind and reaches 
out toward the mark of the future. If we can 
right the wrongs of yesterday or make good its 
losses, let us not forget them; if past blunders can 
guide us into ways of safety now, let us remem- 
ber them; but if we cannot use the past as a tool 
with which to shape the present, let us put it be- 
hind us forever, for its only power is to take our 
happiness away. 

Happiness comes when we have learned to 
make, of the various ingredients of our lives, a 
scale of living that shall be practically harmoni- 
ous. There is no such thing as absolute harmony, 
so far as man’s attainment can achieve. An or- 
chestra is never perfectly in tune and a piano- 
tuner is a man who knows how to put a piano 
properly out of tune. There is a margin of error 
necessarily present in the instrument which is dis- 
tributed throughout the entire scale, each note 
taking its share. It is just so with all the concerns 
of our lives. Harmony is a matter of adjusting 
inflexible facts to the ideal toward which we strive. 

205 


CHARACTER. AND, HAPPINESS 


But you will say much of this is extremely obvi- 
ous. I admit that many of these sayings are trite 
enough. Very well, let us read the rest of our 
text, the words that go before and come after it. 
Jesus said, “If ye know these things, happy are 
ye if ye do them.” Whether or not he meant by 
‘these things” the precepts we have just been lay- 
ing down, the principle is unaltered. We can find 
happiness only when our actions are in accord with 
our convictions. If, today, you will live as you 
believe you ought to live, you will be, at least for 
one day, a happy man. 


206 


PEACE IN A WORLD OF TURMOIL 


IF you would learn the longings of men, con- 
sider their favorite jokes. The saying, “Anything 
for a quiet life,” is one of those jocular phrases 
which indicate the deepest yearning of multitudes. 
When Jesus invited the weary and heavy laden to 
come to him and find rest unto their souls, he ap- 
pealed to a desire as universal as humanity. 
Everywhere men and women long for peace. So 
We are not surprised that when the Master talks 
to his friends on the eve of the day of his cruci- 
fixion, it is peace that he promises them. ‘My 
peace I give unto you,” he says, and it is indicative 
of the profound tranquillity of his character that 
these men who knew him so well should express 
no astonishment that he offered them such a gift 
at such a time. 

It is clear from his words that he thought of 
these men as living in two spheres. Two opposing 
regimens claimed them and they must pay the 
claims of both. They were to labor in the prac- 
tical world and of that world they must be a part. 
They must travel its dusty roads, making their 
way among its jostling crowds, doing the work of 
men whose appointed habitation is a scene of strife 
and tribulation, yet they must keep themselves 

207 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


unspotted and must dwell within the sphere of 
peace. It was for them to touch pitch and not be 
defiled, to ‘‘live amidst the tempest and not be tem- 
pest-tossed.” 

“In the world,” he said, ‘ve shall have tribu- 
lation.” As he looked into the future, he saw how 
terribly the world would use them. Before them 
lay the path of apostolic duty, beset with all the 
hate and prejudice of a decadent pagan civiliza- 
tion. They were to preach the word of reconcilia- 
tion to no world of amiable toleration; but to one 
that would reply with jeers and stones, with 
stripes and prison cells, with cold, hunger, hatred 
and cruel death. At least three of these eleven 
men, to whom he leaves the gift of peace, shall die 
as martyrs, by stoning, by beheading and by the 
cross. It was no easy prospect, yet he offered 
them peace and his promise was fulfilled. It has 
been the task of those who have followed them 
to persuade world-weary men and women that this 
realm of peace is no inaccessible mountain peak, 
but that it is to be gained by any traveler who 
wants to find it and who will honestly try. 

It was Ruskin who wondered, not at what men 
suffered, but at what they missed. That so many 
lives should fail to find rest and tranquillity until 
they enter into the mysterious silence of the grave 
is a strange commentary on man’s blindness to the 
gifts of God. There are multitudes of useful, 
good, kindly people who never know an hour of 

208 


PEACE IN A WORLD OF TURMOIL 


restful quiet. There are multitudes of men who, 
in going from business place to home, go simply 
from one scene of exhausting anxiety to another. 
There are households in which are to be found all 
the physical comforts that money can buy or skill 
provide, but in which no one is ever known to be 
at rest, save in such hours as are grudgingly given 
to sleep. ‘Their inmates are slaves to the spirit 
of restless pleasure, of nervous tension and social 
extravagance. Of every molehill these people 
make a mountain and of every teapot a tempest. 
To be a guest in such a home, with its confused 
round of rackety pleasures, its jangling telephone 
bells, its incessant going and coming and its utter 
neglect of the cultivation of the higher values of 
family life, is to be made to understand why the 
young women of our prosperous classes are so 
often quite without that repose in which alone 
charm can be made manifest and why young men 
of presumably good rearing are utterly without 
manners. 

The things which destroy our peace are often 
necessary and good in themselves. Our tendency 
to wrangle with life grows out of anxiety to do 
our duty. If people had no care for one another, 
there would be little quarreling. If parents did 
not love their children there would be little ex- 
travagance. A thoroughly selfish person would 
find it easy enough to live a comfortable, tranquil 
life. It is a pity that our solicitude for our duty 

209 


CHARAC LER AN DV AR? EN teas 


and for each other should be perverted until life 
becomes embittered by the very things that should 
make it sweet. 

To know the peace of Christ it is not necessary 
to avoid the common human conflict. If we are 
to do more than while away an indolent existence, 
life cannot be soft and easy, even in the best of 
circumstances. No philosophy of mere amiability 
will suffice. That proverbial phrase, “anything 
for a quiet life” is usually quoted in justification 
of compromise or surrender. We must not gain 
peace at the expense of principle or the violation 
of conviction. This world is full of real trouble 
and, unless we selfishly elect to live only in the 
sunshine, there must be many days when the val- 
ley of the shadows shall close in on us before, at 
last, we find our way to the green fields and still 
waters beyond. It is not the plan of God that 
human life should be a soft and easy thing. In 
the most divine of all utterances there is much 
talk of trials and crosses and much urging to bear 
burdens with consecrated courage. 

Yet, in the midst of this troublous world there 
is peace to be had. It is not found in the distrac- 
tions of pleasure-seeking, it does not come to us 
while we shuffle to the frenzied droning of the 
saxophone, nor is it the thing that accrues to us 
when we have made a profitable business deal. It 
is discovered only in the realm of the spirit; it is 
the gift of God; it is found in that ‘“‘other’’ world 

210 


PEACE IN A WORLD OF TURMOIL 


in which the Christian, while he fights life’s battles 
and does life’s work, yet finds rest unto his soul. 

Our commonest failure is in our foolish blind- 
ness to the practical availability of our own spirit- 
ual powers. Religion is regarded either as a pleas- 
ant diversion or as a fanatical fad by a host of 
good people who only need religion to become 
eficient and happy. Their lives are spent in 
jangling discord because they refuse to cultivate 
the only faculty of their natures which can help 
them to peace. The old-fashioned evangelists ex- 
hort their hearers to “get right with God.” There 
is sound human experience behind that exhorta- 
tion; nor can the treatment of the most progressive 
psychologist improve on it. If the life is not 
right with God it cannot be right with anything, 
for man is, fundamentally, a spiritual being. It is 
vain to suppose that we can secure peace by the 
adjustment of some top-story piece of furniture, 
such as our economic status, when the foundation 
of life is askew. Multitudes of unhappy people 
would find peace if only they could summon enough 
common sense to avail them in adjusting their 
spiritual powers to the business of successful 
living. 

One reason why contemplation of the spiritual 
verities brings peace is that such contemplation 
helps us to a correct perspective. “The lesson of 
life,” says Emerson, “‘is to believe what the years 
and the centuries say against the hours.” If you 

211 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


would appreciate the music of an orchestra, you 
must not sit too close to the kettle-drums. If you 
would know the harmonies of life, you must learn 
how to withdraw from the clamor of life’s caco- 
phonous busyness. You must know what man to 
follow in order that you may come to that quiet 
upper room where the divine voice can be heard. 
Religious faith alone is not enough to accomplish 
this for most people. They need the help that 
comes through ‘‘the practice of the presence of 
God.” Worship, prayer, the reading of scripture 
and habitual withdrawal to the quiet interior of a 
church all aid us in finding this peace. For this 
reason all churches should be beautiful, quiet and 
harmonious, even though they be not elaborate. 
The architectural horrors one sees, built by men 
whose idol is efficiency, have done inestimable harm 
to the religion of America, having done a part in 
turning the minister into a showman and the con- 
gregation into a gaping crowd of thrill-seekers. 
If you would be helped in the spiritual life, find a 
church somewhere in which you are made conscious 
of withdrawal from the glare and noise of the 
world. In such a place the voices of eternity will 
seem to speak and the serene assurances of faith 
will find you in a mood of reverent acceptance. 
This age is not a peaceful age. Each day brings 
its new alarms and each day we are exhorted to 
be up and doing in some new enterprise, to be 
tearing down and rebuilding, to reform all things 
212 


PEACE IN A WORLD OF TURMOIL 


that are and to bring to pass all things that are 
not. We hold in vigorous idolatry such words as 
punch and pep and ginger and all those other con- 
dimental qualities which are supposed just now to 
season the lives of all the strenuous, red-blooded 
and efficient. It is a blessing that we can find, 
somewhere, a deep, still pool, away from the tur- 
bulent stream and untroubled by the furious pad- 
dlings of those who know no kind of progress save 
rushing round and round in a whirlpool. 

This peace of Christ is not stagnation. There 
is nothing more positive, nothing with more of 
the quality of the flame about it than the life of 
the person who has entered into abiding relations 
with the Divine. If you would understand this, 
learn to think of Him, a solitary figure in a world 
of hostile hate, making His way through the 
clamoring crowd with a strength unparalleled yet 
with a tranquillity never disturbed, turning the 
world aside from its course, yet never himself 
turned aside by it. 

It is the quiet of perfected power. Sometimes 
in these days of automobiles we are terrified by 
the snorting of an ongoing chariot which belches 
smoke and stench as it goes, rattling, skidding and 
exploding on its way, an object both of terror and 
contempt. Then slips by, at half again its careen- 
ing speed, some great machine, gliding silently, 
tranquilly, without fume or fuss. It is the silence 
of complete adjustment. 


213 


CHARACTER AND HAPPINESS 


We remember how Jesus slept in the ship while 
the tempest roared and all the others were terri- 
fied. ‘The only person in that boat who could 
quiet the storm was the only one who was not dis- 
quieted by it. So we turn to him and in the midst 
of our turbulent world he reveals to us a sphere 
of peace. And may it be that when you are sore 
beset, when the winds are high and the waves 
threaten, you may look across the broken waters 
and see him coming to you. May it be that all 
the futile tossings of your little ship shall cease as 
you hear his words, “Peace, be still.” 


214 


ed 
§ 


: are a 4 
Wrahie sy oT 
oe dt a a, | 


f 


é od * Shah 


a ir “Vj 
Peat: aa, 
hat AY 





rinceton Theological Seminary Libraries 


S, 
= 
S) 


a Ke @ 
Dial 


AG 25°9 
FACULTY 


| yl #4 
S 
@ 


. 





reef 


as 


ote ne et Se te, 


ag 


ae 


3 
> 
a 


~*~ 
oie 
Se, 
“te er 
he 


pes 
Sa. 


ear 
25% 


tt oe 


+ tehy 
aehaet 


ay? 


oe 
¢ 
is 
re 


Sees 
ee 


oe tp tele! te ay f : tH eoars , yea? 4 St 
Pe % 4,9 Fey SED ; + t { ) F 
srateter f ' ils 
ae sent : : ‘i i Th f Mec oesn nee key 3 fe 
ge oene se ? atts, ; t Saree A : phates tit b ¥) ; eee 


ee Xe 


Mya Bai 

en Secernseaay 

tt balnyea pels, 
45%. 


ee 


oc? 


+ 
ae 2 ehh e lt 
esfeestensters tuateatates 
S435 ope eae ts tee as ¥ : Mi : : 


3 


pt 
3 
oh 


mei 
ms ee 
: 


<9 





